Out Of Joint
by Blue-Inked Frost
Summary: A lone wanderer, remembering nothing in a world after war, finds a quest. Complete.
1. Part I

**OUT OF JOINT**

**A/N:** For Scarab Dynasty, slightly after her birthday. Happy nineteenth, Scarab.

Note: Contains some swearing. One-shot concept posted in three parts for greater convenience.

--

Dust surrounded him, thick particles filling his nose and mouth as he breathed heavy warm air. His eyelids felt like they were made of lead, dust settling on them as well, sealing them closed. His body, too, was too heavy to lift, and inside his head he knew he could do nothing.

But what was there to do? The question struck something in him, a match against a dark fence-post failing to light. There seemed nothing for him to do that was more important than lie here, nothing more than to continue allowing the dust to devour him. He was…but what was he? He was nothing, with no indication in his mind as to where he was or what he was, or who he was at all.

Was there a word for this forgetting, this lack of memory? His thoughts moved as sluggishly as the dust-filled air on his face. He had been, he was, he was here, here was… Here was where he came to a blank, and recalled nothing of where he was supposed to be, even if such a place existed.

He should open his eyes, he began to decide—it felt like years, and perhaps was; his thoughts seemed to move at the pace of dried milk. It did not feel like a motion he had practised for some time, and he blinked, trying to let the dust flow from his eyes and allow him to see…

…grey. That was the name of the colour around him, he knew, although how remained an unsolved question. Grey rock above him, lit by a small light coming through an equally small hole in the wall to his left. Grey rock next to him, forming the walls bar for one bright spot. He heard, then, through clogged ears a rattling noise, and then with his eyes noticed a few pebbles flowing past the hole. Grey rock, probably, below him, of material similar to the rolling pebbles and the remainder of the cave.

His arms would have to be the next to move. He began to tense them, slowly, as though they were made of the sinews of mountains; and they moved like that, slowly and ponderously, waking from the earth below them.

He had large hands, he thought, spreading his fingers on top of the rock beneath and feeling how heavy they weighed on him. A giant's body, perilous and cumbersome to move, but the will behind it seemed to match, and his own determination shocked him.

The muscles tensed, pained, moved; he levered himself up with his hands, to look down at his legs resting on the ground. He saw more grey; he was clad in some sort of armour of that shade, or perhaps it was a carapace, patterns of sinew and ligament and vein drawing themselves on it like strands of seaweed moving together. Large, he thought again, not having any frame of reference with which to judge, but thinking of moving that huge frame of its own accord.

It was almost easier to get his legs moving, following the arms, though he did not think of that earlier success as an encouragement, but rather as one small step in his greater goal. When he finally stood on two feet, shakily balancing on a rough stone floor, it was not an occasion for jubilation; such thoughts were as alien to him as his identity.

He felt a coldness coming from his back, surprising in the dry warm air that surrounded him. In three precarious steps he put one of those hands to rest on the wall; it had a gnarled appearance, thick-jointed and dark-fingernailed, a hand that could destroy but would have difficulty in rebuilding. He closed his eyes to regain what strength he could; when that was finally done, he concentrated on forcing the coldness from him.

It was easy to feel the dust now, not just on his face but by another way of perception, finer made and more ready to sense than the pressing weight of the remainder of his covered form; it was springing free after a long imprisonment, he gradually came to think, ready to be stretched and prepared.

He brought it to his face; more grey, a darker shade and almost greenish in the dark, banded about like the tendril of a thick plant or perhaps a tree trunk laid sideways. Three more flowed around to join it, their movements slow but sure as they woke from their long dreaming, ready to go forth in his name and make ways ready. They were warming, taking the heat from the air and reanimating, preparing themselves.

A small hole had already been made in the cave wall. Perhaps it had been what had first woken him up, the slight light after many years of slumber transforming both the darkness and the sleeper. He knew for certain that it was the way towards his liberty, and that was the purpose of the cold things.

One of them made its way forward, delicately questing at the edges of the small hole as he felt every crevice; there were animal sounds above, he heard, and perhaps that was what had created the hole in the first place by a chance rockslide. More pebbles skittered down, and he felt them bounce off; he identified the sensation, though he could feel no pain. Then another joined the first, positioning itself also at the hole, going to the left as the other took the right, shaping themselves around the rock's sharp curves and preparing to pull.

He took a step backwards, whether by instinct or by choice he could not know, and watched as they ripped the rock apart to leave a doorway large enough for him to exit by. He was not shocked; it was another necessary part of his goal that he had now achieved. Accepting the four tentacles, he drew them back into his body as he made his way out into the sunshine for the first time since he had slept.

And he collapsed on the dust and pebbles, strong legs no longer supporting him, bright light blinding him, and did not move from there until the golden light had died and been reborn six times, and a layer of dust had formed on him as though he was just another rock.

--

He could hear a chugging noise which his brain identified as the sound of a machine, too loud in this quiet dusty place, and accompanied by bumps and bangs he suspected were doing the machine little good.

"Hey!" he heard a voice crying. Was it directed to him? There was no reason why it should be, surely; he recalled no friends or acquaintances. "You there!" The engine powered down. "Jeeze, Chrys, is he dead?"

He slowly raised his head on muscles which felt like they had grown stronger since his awakening to stare at the heads leaning out of the windows of their vehicle.

"…Shit," one of them said. "Stay back!"

He was too slow to dodge the something hard that hit him on the face, simply watching in surprise.

"Fuck, where's the gun?"

"Just drive! Some of 'em don't feel bullets!"

Another hard thing hit him; he flicked out a tentacle to catch it this time. It was a bottle, sharp-edged and just heavy enough to do some damage if correctly wielded.

"_Go_! Look at it, _drive_!"

The engine started again as he stared at the vehicle and its inhabitants in some bemusement; he could have attempted to stop them, but he did not see the point. Why had they reacted so to seeing his face? He reached a hand up to see if he could detect any abnormality in his features; he found two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and that some areas of his skin felt of a slightly different texture than others, nothing different to what the inhabitants of the car possessed in feature. On the top of his head, he felt that unlike the people in the car he was bald; perhaps that was the taboo? He filed the information away as a problem he would have to solve later.

The vehicle had been passing along the dark grey path in front of him on a surface adapted for it; it would almost certainly be going towards what passed for civilisation in this place. Perhaps others at the vehicle's destination would also loathe the sight of him, but he had no other plans.

He stood slowly, and tensed the muscles in his legs to prepare for the journey ahead.

--

No more vehicles travelled past him for hours as he followed the road, choosing the infrequent turnings at random, the signs meaningless to him and some of them rusted and fallen. Some of the land beside him appeared to have been burned, some time ago; he was not sure by what.

Finally, in the distance he could see a building at the side of the road; he considered the need for refreshment, and then realised that he had no need of it as yet. He was careful, though, to walk towards it with his hands raised in a gesture that suggested no harm would come to any of the inhabitants, preparing himself for the chance that they might react in a similar fashion to the vehicle's passengers. There were more burned areas on the side of the road, the black ground scoured of plant or animal life; he did not think they made him as uneasy as they ought.

He heard no cries as he approached the building; there was no doubt that his large form would have been seen at a long distance away in such flat country, but he noticed no signs, whether good or bad, that his presence had been so much as noticed. As he drew closer, he noticed that the building was not clean, and had not been for a very long time; like the areas around it, it had been burned at some point in the past, and had not been repaired. It was not inhabited after all, he realised, seeing its damage more closely; he would have been surprised if anyone had so much as walked inside within the past five years.

Outside it stood several pump systems, also damaged, though he saw faint tyre tracks left in the dirt around them, the right size for the vehicle that he had seen, and a few of the pumps appeared to have been recently displaced. Perhaps the pumps had once been used for some sort of fuel for vehicles; the area was certainly the right size for a refuelling station.

He entered the building, more out of curiosity than anything else, leaving large footprints in the dust and debris overlaying the floor. There were a lot of large shelves, long overturned without contents, a large counter with the top of it ripped off, and behind that a small door leading to another room.

Similarly to the main room, the small one was also cleared of most property, though in a corner buried under a broken cupboard there was some sort of old garment. He examined it; the material had not decayed much over the years despite its smell and the dirt that covered it. It was a coat too small for his form, but a practical use for it would be to cover his head, in case that had indeed been what had frightened the people in the vehicle. There was other debris, too, the remains of a fire, a few old cans, and even a coin, but other than that he found nothing that he required. He found a second small room, this one on the other side of the structure, but it stunk badly and he did not spend long there.

Uninhabited, this building; he wondered what catastrophe had caused the devastation of this and the surrounding areas, and continued on his way down the road. Perhaps the next humans he encountered would be able to inform him about the building and its fate.

The sun rose higher and higher in the sky, and the heat and light would have been overpowering but for the material shadowing his face. The dark, textured ground would have been hot too, but the hard skin of his bare feet seemed to protect him. Would other people be the same? He had not seen the feet of the humans in the vehicle, but their pale skin had looked too fragile to withstand this long labour of travel. He filed it away as another factor he would have to think about, later.

As the sun finally dipped towards a distant darkness, he saw another building set to the roadside's edge, far in front of him. It looked shabby, coloured a dark grey dappled with lighter spots of decay, with small bowed structures set to the front of it, but human clothing hung limply behind it, and there was smoke coming from its roof. It would be his goal, he determined; perhaps the humans in there would be more informative.

He approached, not bothering with caution; in the arid landscape there was little possibility of hiding, and his body was resilient enough to take any hostility. He had no need to fear.

A loud noise broke the heat-drenched silence as he felt something rush over his head.

"Stop right there and stick 'em up!" a voice growled.

He stopped walking; in this strange world, he might as well play along to its dictates until they began to harm him.

"I said, stick 'em up!" the voice repeated.

_Stick what up_? His question was answered by a further statement.

"Put your hands where I can see them and wait while I come up to you. One warning shot is all Sam Hearney gives."

He obeyed the instruction; whatever the 'warning shot' had been, the velocity suggested by the air movement probably meant that it could do him some damage, though he doubted it would destroy him.

The person presumably called Sam Hearney advanced towards him, carrying a long, black instrument; a look of shock spread over his face as he came close enough to see his features. "Okay. Give me one reason why I shouldn't blast you to Kingdom Come—or wherever you people go."

He shook his head; he couldn't think of any good reason why this stranger shouldn't destroy him. He was nothing but a memoryless creature with no past or future; Sam Hearney was no friend or family to him. There was nothing he could offer to persuade the man against destroying him. "I…do not crave destruction," he said after a while, feeling the pressure of the man's eyes watching him and the black instrument trained in his direction. That might change once he had his memories back—who knew what he might crave then?—but for now he only wished for knowledge.

"Ya sure?" The black instrument didn't lower. "I saw enough of what you freaks did in the war. Can't trust any of you."

"What war?" he asked. It was a logical enough explanation for the damage he had seen around him, and if people like himself—the phrase gave him a thrill, _people like himself_ existed even if Sam Hearney called them 'freaks'—had fought in it that would explain the hostility towards him.

The man gave an exasperated sigh. "_The_ war. You know it. When you freaks appeared from who-knew-where and started attacking everything in sight. Started close on twenty years ago now, and nothing repaired ten years after the last big battle hearabouts."

"I have no memory of it." The truth sounded inadequate, and he did not blame Sam Hearney for the look of scepticism that was written across his face. "What happened after the last big battle?"

"You'd know. Ain't no freaks been appearing for long years."

"If I knew and I wished to attack everything in sight," he said slowly, "would I try to say I remembered nothing, which I do not?"

The man snorted. "Double bluff. Triple bluff. Whatever." He looked slightly more thoughtful for an instant. "I guess I never saw any of you trying the stealth approach, you weren't smart enough for that. But you look big enough to pack a punch or two, and we don't like taking risks these days."

"I do not intend to harm you," he said quickly; he could simply whip out a tentacle and take the man's weapon from his hand if he had to. He calculated the distance and the effort in an instant, knowing that he would win a fight if Sam Hearney started one, knowing that he was fast and strong and unable to be defeated. But he did not make his move; the other man seemed to be waiting for something, and he did not want to mark his blank memory with blood shed for no reason.

"Samuel!" he heard a higher voice crying. He watched as a woman pushed her way out of the building and hurried down to stand next to the man. "What is this…this _person_ doing here?"

"I'm asking him, Em. Now what's your problem?"

"And what _are_ you doing here?" The woman jutted out her bony chin towards him, evidently giving him license to answer. "Destruction, murder and chaos?"

"I followed the road," he told her. "I don't remember any of the three in your list. Do you know who or what I am? That is what I wish to learn, not how easily one of these buildings burns."

"I know what. Don't care about the _who_," Sam Hearney said firmly.

"Stop it, Sam. He doesn't harm us, we don't harm him," Em told him, placing a hand on top of the instrument and lowering it to point downwards. "We've never turned away a stranger for fifty-five years if they did no harm, though if he does…" She brought a small black thing from the side of her pants, taking it out in a movement that facing the sunset light was almost too fast for him to notice. "I'll shoot him myself."

He had not moved during Em's small speech; they would not answer questions truthfully if they thought he was going to attack them, and their weapons would probably harm him.

"We still haven't seen anything like you for five years," Em said, still pointing her own weapon at him. "Where'd you come from, Mr Amnesiac?"

"I woke in a cave." The answer was almost nonsensical, he knew. Confiding the truth to these two made him feel uncomfortable, but he did not know what lies would be convincing in this world. "I have no memories of who and what I am."

The two exchanged glances. "Likely story," Sam said, spitting on the ground.

"We'll make you a deal," Em said. "You ain't done nothing to hurt us. There's a brain in your head even if you're as evil as the rest of them. You work—it looks like you've got a strong back, and Sam's been bad for the past year—and in return we talk. Any funny business and we shoot you to the place you call white hot oblivion."

_What's white hot oblivion?_

"Agreed," he said. He might have felt galled, he thought, to submit, but these people appeared shrewd enough, and he needed answers more than anything else.

--

"And once you've lifted the last of those out, we're going to need a hand to fix the wall," Sam told him, keeping a careful eye on him as he used his tentacles to almost effortlessly heft the large barrels from the storehouse. His strength seemed to have impressed the two humans; they had not left him alone for a moment since they had given him their orders and seen him easily do the tasks they had struggled at. It was no doubt one of the reasons by which he was marked out as different, and he desperately wanted them to finally fulfil their part of the bargain and enlighten him as to who and what he was.

He placed the barrels in a careful pile out the front where, Sam had mentioned, they would be sold to travellers.

"Did a red vehicle pass this way?" he asked as he made sure the barrels were securely piled up.

"Yah, two hours back. Gave us a hundred bucks for a full tank and ran off fast, like they were scared of something. Friends of yours?"

"They saw me and were afraid."

"What'd you do to them?"

When he did not reply, Sam pointed to the building. "We're fixing the wall to the west. You're gonna be helping me get the timbers into place."

There were several large planks piled on the ground, and a heavy curtain draped over a gap in the wall.

"We don't need it mostly," Em said. "It's hot enough in the daytime, and when Sam got his bad back we couldn't finish it off. I'll be cooking the supper while you boys work."

Sam picked up a hammer from a toolbox lying on the ground. "I'll be nailing them over the gap while you get them into place," he said. "Hold them steady."

He nodded; it was hardly a difficult task for such as himself, he thought, though as the splinters began to pierce through his tentacles he began to reconsider.

"Soup's up," he heard Em calling, and was glad of the impending relief.

"Three to go," Sam yelled back. "Keep it on the stove."

"Finish it later. Gas is short enough as is, and you've worked him enough for tonight."

"He's not like us," Sam protested, but put down his equipment anyway. "We'll finish this after Em and I have our supper," he said.

"He's having some too if he wants," Em said. "You eat food?"

He considered the question; he had not eaten since he had exited the cave, and had not noticed the lack. But he was pained and tired, and if he could get the stuff down it could only help him. "Yes," he said.

"Sam will show you where the pump is. Wash your hands and get a move on."

After the man had quickly cleansed his own hands, he followed suit, pulling down the handle and lathering up the rough cake of soap to clean himself of the dust that had collected on him. He dipped his tentacles under there, too, to try to soothe the splinters that had wormed their way into his flesh, but Sam stopped him with a curt 'can't afford to waste water these times'.

He sat down to a small bowl filled with an odd-looking brown substance; beside it was a scooping implement, from the actions of the humans to be used to convey the substance to one's mouth. He imitated the movements of Sam and Em, carefully curling his large hand around the delicate-appearing cutlery and bringing it to his mouth, where the heat of the food burned him. The humans appeared to have no such difficulty, breathing a small amount of air across the liquid before swallowing it, and he did the same, drawing in breath for the first time since he had woken.

"It's just onion and tinned cabbage and beef stock," Em said. "Our store trip isn't till next month."

He nodded politely, though the words she used did not remind him of anything he had known; and no wonder, if his people did not always eat food.

"Can you tell me about the people like me?" he asked after he had eaten a few mouthfuls of the food. The taste did not displease him, and it seemed to be making warm energy flow through him, becoming part of his body.

"What we know of them. You're not exactly chatty types," Sam said, pushing aside the bowl he had quickly emptied. "It all started twenty years ago. I was US Army then—" he seemed to sit up a little straighter, as though this was a great honour—"just posted back from Iraq when it all went crazy here. I was just thirty then—the war added twenty years on my life. Some said it was just evolution, though we never held with that…"

"And some say it was one of us, a scientist gone crazy, but hardly anyone likes to think a human'd do something like _that_," Em added. "Whatever it was, people like you started appearing out of nowhere. Had a flock of crazy bat-things all flying in our house and up our flue, as easy as you please, and my sister's flat got pulverized by a creature the size of a mountain, like Godzilla." She shook her head.

"I was posted to fight them, in our own country, not that they all stayed here. Shot anything nonhuman on sight, bagged hundreds of them with my Lee Enfield. But there were always more to come, and some of them didn't die so easy."

_I wouldn't die easily._ The thought struck him suddenly, a cold memory from a past life; he tried to snatch at the trail of memory, but it was already gone from him.

"What happened in the end?" he asked.

Sam shrugged. "Nobody ever knew, or if those bigwigs from the government did, they never told anyone. They just faded away, year by year, though nothing from our world ever managed to fade back. I reckon they just couldn't last long enough in this world. I came out here with Em once the battles were over. Like I said, it's been five years since I saw one of you, and that was just a single goldworm. Now it's your turn to tell your story."

"What is the difference between me and you? I have similar features." Two hands, two legs, eyes and nose and mouth; he had extra tentacles, but they stayed hidden most of the time.

"You're not real."

_I _am_ real_, he thought, the statement filling him with outrage. _I'm here, I'm strong, I must be real._

"You're _cartoon_ real, I mean," Sam continued. "It's the skin. Not complicated enough, not pores and sweat and blood but smooth. Simplified. Look at it." He sighed in impatience. "And there's your tentacles, the outfit, and the fact you're near eight foot high. See it yet?"

He looked down at his hand resting on the table, its largeness dwarfing the bowl next to it, and compared it with the hands of Sam and Em. There was no question about it: the texture was different in a way he couldn't quite put into words, marking him as _other_.

"It's not that I lack hair, then." He cursed himself over the simple hypothesis that had been so easily proved wrong.

"Nope. But the tattoos are weird." Sam leaned back in his chair and lit a white cylinder, which he brought to his mouth and used to blow a puff of pungent-smelling smoke into the air.

"You going to tell us your story?" Em stood to pick up the bowls. "There were heroes way back, they said. Things that looked more like us, like you. They didn't kill humans and fought the other ones. They died quickly."

"I'm not dead." Had he been a hero, though? He couldn't remember. "I woke up in a cave not long ago and walked along the road. There is nothing more to the story. So not all of us hurt people?"

"Twenty years ago." Sam shook his head. "They're gone."

"I remember some of the stories they used to tell way back, like when the Lightning Lady stopped the Colorado disaster," Em added, briskly running the dishes under a trickle of water coming from the sink. "And the Lightning Man, though he might've been just a myth, Lightning Boy, and another guy they called the Virus. Any of them ring a bell?"

He thought, trying to let one of the names spark something inside his head—one of them could even be _himself_, he thought with excitement—but they remained mere words. "No," he said eventually. "I don't think so."

Sam and Em exchanged glances.

"Well," Em said. "You'd better get back to helping Sam fix the wall, and no funny business. You'll sleep in the shed, and there'll be more for you to do in the morning."

--

It was after several days of performing various tasks for Sam and Em and listening to their talk that he realised just how odd it was for something like him to be in the area, and how much more odd it was for humans like them to be offering him hospitality. The 'others like him' had mostly been beasts incapable of reasoning, and from his shape and actions he was not like that, but even so it was fortunate Sam had not seen him well enough to shoot him on sight. The heroes had looked more like him, he learned from Sam's descriptions of the battles he had lived through, but they had been rare and dead. It was good enough that Sam and Em were starting to think of him as less a dangerous creature and more a useful, peaceful sentient.

_Heroes die_, something inside his head whispered to him, but he ignored it. He wouldn't have to be as suicidal as a hero was supposedly meant to behave.

Sam and Em lived a secluded life, he learned, supplying fuel by hand to travelling vehicles in return for cash; every month, they used their own small vehicle to make a trip 'to town' in order to pick up supplies. In the old days, a lot of fuel had been stored underground here by Sam as soon as the war started, a forethought which had saved them much these days. It was an ugly area, part because of the war and part because it had always been a desert, and there was little opportunity for business, but what there was always paid well, and the humans got by. It was more than most living through the war had received.

The surrounding devastation almost impressed him with its thoroughness and power; whatever terrible creature had scorched the ground he had seen—Sam had talked about fire-breathers, giant dragons with sapphire wings and deadly breath, and phoenixes, born in flame and setting themselves and everything around them afire, as well as human weapons that had destroyed their own people along with their enemies—had been strong indeed. He himself was strong for a mortal, much stronger than Sam had been even in his prime, he thought, and his tentacles assisted him, but he did not feel that he was anything near something which could unleash that much destruction—or prevent it, he reminded himself.

Why had he woken up? Or possibly appeared, he realised; he could not be sure that he had always been lying in that cave. But he had been covered in dust; if he had appeared, it was not recently. If he was the precursor to a thousand new arrivals, nothing had been seen of them as yet. Sam and Em without fail played their radio in a nightly ritual in order to learn news of their country, and it was all rebuilding projects and human problems and governmental changes rather than anything that interested him. Perhaps he had been held in thrall by some design during the war and only now it had worn off, though he could not imagine any reason why he had not faded away with the others, because surely some of those like himself would have also slept. He could have walked back to the cave to take a closer look at it, just in case it held special information, but he could recall the images to his mind—it was strange that he had near-perfect recall of recent events, yet none at all of his older history—and there was nothing there more unusual than a decaying human road sign.

He worked, day after day, in the warm sun over the burned land, scarcely feeling exhaustion as he laboured for the humans who had taken him in, hiding himself whenever a lonely vehicle trundled its way up the road and into the filling station. He had nowhere else to go; and so time passed.

--

He was lifting cans with his tentacles, transferring fuel to the smaller containers that were easier for Sam and Em to use.

The vehicle which pulled up was no different from any other, creaking and rocking along the road followed by a plume of exhaust, this one painted a red that had once been bright. As always, he walked backwards into the shadow of the house to wait until they were gone.

"Fill her up and hurry, old man," he heard a voice from inside the car yell.

"It'll be seventy-five," Sam said. "And I'm gonna see the colour of your money first." His gravely voice sounded more like stone than usual in response to the rudeness.

There was a sound like spit landing on the ground. "Seventy-five? Fucking robbery."

"Go find another station," Sam said. "I'm not obliged to serve you here, and we don't like troublemakers hereabouts."

"I got a better deal. You give us the petrol and we don't shoot you, man, because we've got places to go."

"You—"

"You put that gun down or I shoot!" he heard Em yell from her habitual place at the kitchen window. "Petrol's not worth your worthless hides."

"He gives it to us or we shoot your man," one of them said. "Else we're not gonna make it to Tombstone without supplies."

It was time for him to intervene; he could do this, he knew, though whether by instinct or memory was not clear.

"No. We are _not_ giving anything to thugs like you, and if you know what's good for you, you will be _off_ our property immediately." Em, sounding harried indeed.

"Kneecap the old man, Ben," someone in the car said, and it was then that he intervened.

He grabbed Sam with a tentacle, putting him behind himself and near the house; with another two, he reached inside the car itself and pushed it on its side. There were loud cracks and screaming sounding around him, and he felt something sharp almost penetrating his tentacles.

"What is _that_!"

"Shoot it! My god, shoot that thing, get the hell out of here!"

The thugs spilled out of the car, clambering out with their weapons held in their hands. Red bloomed out of one of their shoulders, and he realised Sam and Em were shooting too. Small things hit his carapace, but he barely felt the impacts as a strange, fierce sensation shot through him.

_They shall not harm what is mine._

It was memory telling him what to do, he would have sworn, as he reached out with a tentacle, knocking three of them from their feet and crushing the fourth in his grip, feeling the energy surging from the man to him and leaving a red, crushed mass behind. He did the same for the second, and the third, as bullets kept flying into him, and when he came to the fourth the man had thrown away his empty gun and was kneeling on the ground, begging.

It was as though a red tornado had seized his brain; he grabbed the man as he had done to the rest, and stole his energy. There were no more shots in the air, and in the sudden quiet after the man's scream he started to return to himself.

He sensed a device unfamiliar to him, a glimmering component that felt brighter than the old radio; he reached down and plucked it from the fourth man's pocket without noticing the red stain on his tentacle. It was crushed by the battle, a small silver thing with wires hanging out. There was energy in this, too, and he drew it out; and as he drew it he saw everything in the land.

Not everything, he would realise later; just a small fraction of a network, in the dying spark of the mortal machine's final moments. But it opened up a new world to him, a vista of shining centres of power and a vast network that this thing could access, and he was left with a vision of more energy than he could use.

_Superheroes, fighting, energy drain_. The information rushed through his mind as he opened himself to the electricity, letting it course through him like human blood. Who he was could be hidden _here_, among these machines that held so much power in the way they all joined together, making him more than what he had been.

_Killer bite_, he thought, replaying the memories of the recent battle, _kill a byte_, and finally the single word _Kilobyte_.

And then it all blinked out, as the circuits of it fell apart in his tentacle, crumbling into dust without the power animating them any more.

He looked up to see Sam and Em staring at him; they had not lowered their guns. He ran a hand over his body absently, feeling small bumps that had impacted upon his armour; he used his fingernails to start prying one out. Evidently bullets didn't harm him.

"I think I realised who I was," he said. "The glowing network of energy. It's where I came from. I'm going to find the rest of it."

"You do that," Sam said slowly. "You just go do that."

He looked around himself, and saw the four shattered bodies on the ground. They had not been good humans, but he could sense the fear that Sam and Em might feel, that if he had done this to others he could do the same to them, and perhaps he _would_, if their energy was the only way he could recapture that feeling of knowing everything once again…

He shook his head at the dark thought.

"We'll be needing to get rid of these," Em said, nodding brusquely towards the still red heaps. "Get the shovel and bury them out the back. It's not like we haven't had to deal with bandits before. Sam, you get a bucket from the pump and wash off the ground."

He sensed a moment of tension between the two of them; Sam was reluctant to move, he could tell. He turned his back on them, and lifted the limp flesh in his reddened tentacles to get started on the task.

The shovel was easy to wield, cutting through the hard ground as though it was made of butter; he did not think about how the energy he had taken had enabled him to use this much strength.

"You saved us, and for that we're grateful," Em said at last, as he returned from the job to see a splatter of water covering where the bodies had fallen. "But you should go now. Get to know what you are."

She had said _what_, not _who_; perhaps that description was accurate enough. "My name is Kilobyte," he said.

"Take the car," Sam told him. "Tombstone's a hundred miles down the road. You'll find more electric stuff there, networks and that. Don't bother coming back."

He nodded. "I understand," he said, and cleaned his tentacles by passing them underneath the dry soil before turning to the thugs' car.

--


	2. Part II

The human vehicle was not of the best quality; he thought he remembered that he had ridden in—and made, though he could not remember how—much faster conveyances than this. He controlled it, using the energy flow through his tentacles to bypass the fuelling system and set its components going of their own accord, sending a shower of sparks running through it as the wheels spun around. With his control of it, it ran faster than any vehicle he had seen travel up to the small fuelling station, and yet it was not enough for him; he was made for better than this, he thought, opening the windows with a mental command just in case the wind on his face would create the illusion of more speed.

Finally, he could see buildings in the distance; he had arrived in a human town, where he would discover more about himself and this world. As he approached, though, he saw that most were worn and shabby, and that the town itself seemed to be dying; if this was part of a network, he would be better off not part of it at all. A peeling road sign pointed north-west, to a place called Phoenix; the image of the bird rising from the ashes appealed to him as a metaphor for his own memory loss, and it struck him as good a place as any in which to try to continue his quest.

He continued to power the vehicle down long roads, and they began to become more crowded; loud beeps started to sound in his ears, and even screeches as one or two human vehicles attempted to pursue his own, but the sounds stopped soon enough. He travelled far faster and navigated better than any of his companions, easily dodging their far slower paths to make his own way onwards.

More vehicles, and yet more, and filling stations on the side of the road that he had no need to stop at; he had energy enough, and he was powerful, he knew, more so than any of these mortals.

When he had at last seen a decaying message reading 'Welcome to Phoenix', he slowed his speed, considering his next move. Where could he find the network that had seemed so attractive?

A blue-and-white car pulled up beside him, making that beeping noise he had become almost accustomed to hearing on the roads.

"Pull over!" he heard a human yell.

He knew the meaning of the direction from his days with Sam and Em, and obeyed, stopping the car in a stretch of ground just off the road. The other vehicle pulled up near him, at an angle that meant he would not drive away without colliding with it.

"You're under arrest, buddy." The human opened his door and walked out from his vehicle. "We got speeding reports from Tombstone to here about this numberplate, and just because things might be different where _you_ come from doesn't mean we here in Phoenix can't enforce the…_shit_."

The human had seen his features, and taken a quick step back. "Hands up or I fire!" he yelled, pulling out a gun.

He sighed inwardly. "I will not destroy you, mortal," he said, and whipped a tentacle out of his window. It took just one moment to grab the gun from the man, and another to envelop him in the tentacle; the man screamed, but as he began to draw energy from him, he slumped down, silent. He drew just enough energy to keep the mortal unconscious for several hours, and then let him be; he was not going to bother to kill someone that had not attempted to do the same.

He took the man's jacket to drape over himself, and ducked from his car into the mortal's. As an afterthought, he placed the mortal into his original car; he suspected that humans driving by might raise an eyebrow at one of their own simply lying on the road.

He had learned something more from this encounter with humans, he reflected as he controlled the new vehicle to move on; these 'speeding reports' probably concerned the velocity at which he had been travelling, which meant that content with their own pathetic abilities, they liked to force others to travel at their speeds.

Driving through the city and easily able to sightsee at the slow speed, he saw that it was heavily populated by mortals, though there still remained some signs of the war; some areas were nothing but black ground, and many of the high buildings had windows of strangely-shaped glass that appeared to have been melted at some point in the past. He directed the vehicle towards what appeared to be the darker alleyways as night started to fall; he could not afford to be seen by many more mortals.

His name was _Kilobyte_, he told himself, and in this city lit with bright electric lamps he was certain to find out everything.

There was a connection in the car, a radio like the one at the fuelling station; he switched it on, listening idly to the reports it gave. It wasn't a news report like the one Sam and Em had preferred to listen to; it gave cryptic information instead, in some sort of code that he did not understand. As he drove deeper into the alleys, he heard the number on the back of the vehicle he was using mentioned; he stopped immediately. His powers could not alter that number, hence it would be best to simply abandon it and steal another if need be.

It was now dark outside, and in here very few of the high electric lamps were functioning at all, some of them standing like dark skeletons and others ripped from their sockets. It was the perfect place for him to hide, and with the jacket obscuring his silhouette he slipped into the night.

--

There was a separate world below the city, once underground shelters and efficient drainage, now a world of slow-moving human stench and waste. It disgusted him in an abstract way, but he could have applied that feeling to all mortals with their fleshy weaknesses, and so he did not complain. He was free from official detection, and with the closest to his kind that he could find, human refuse and misfits, those who had been affected by the war too much.

Some offered him brief conversation and occasionally food; others threatened him and requested him to leave, immediately. He often accepted the former, and acceded to the latter, not wishing to cause unnecessary trouble. It was…logical, he supposed, to be wary of something like himself, but not as logical to continue to believe that something which left so promptly truly wished them harm; but to do anything else would have merely lived down to their expectations, and he forwent such exercise.

He learned some of their stories as he walked from one deep-buried wire to another, feeding off whatever energy he could find. Gary had been bitten by a jewel-green snake from god-knew-where and had grown scales, far brighter than the rest of his human skin; he was almost like one of Kilobyte's own people, though he had no powers, and in conversation he could do nothing but brood on his own past. Teresa had been badly diseased during the war, losing her nose in an ancient plague that nobody knew how to cure; she was cheerful nevertheless, leading a small gang of other runaways, and he played a part in several of her scavenging expeditions. Fisk had fought in several of the war's most brutal battles, and afterwards had refused to go back into machine-using human society for fear of a second accident, no matter what they told him about the processes being outlawed and only the most necessary technology being retained; he had shot the first time he saw him and the second, and it had been Teresa who had told his story. Michel had nowhere else to go; born in the middle of the war, the sewers had become her home when she had lost all other places to go; she barely spoke any understandable language, though she could growl and use her teeth and nails as well as a ferocious animal.

Such were the humans with whom he interacted underground; a motley crew of undesirables, thieves and killers and misfits who like him knew of nothing in the outside world. His interaction was not limited to these; he was also attempting to bring back that vision of the network.

He could touch an electric wire, and from it draw as much power into himself as he desired. He could explore, too, letting his consciousness travel up and into wherever the wire met its hub, and through there into more lines. And yet no more memories came.

He had robbed a human in one of those dark streets, searching for one with a device similar to that of the thug; it had been easy to force it from him as the human's frightened eyes rolled up into his head and urine ran down his leg, though not so easy to refuse Teresa to carry out more thefts. And upon looking into it, there was a web of possible connections springing from it, a network as he had seen before, thousands of thousands of mortal conversations spread through it, none of which concerned him. At last, he was forced to conclude that it was not the substance of the energy he had absorbed but the fact of it that had spurred him on to memory.

He had stagnated at the fuelling station; he resolved not to do the same here, but with no new information with which to work, what could even a creature as powerful as himself do? He learned as best he could from the mortals he encountered and the energy he stole.

The most popular theory underground concerning the war was creatures from outer space who could return at any moment; it seemed to suit their sense of paranoia and self-importance. The heroes were hardly mentioned at all; not surprising, if they had died so soon, but he wished to learn about those who had looked more like himself, and sat through stories of exploding canaries and razorblade clowns and burning lions to gain more information about the Lightning Crew and the Virus.

_Lightning Man_ had not lived long, if at all; he had flown, though, and had probably saved a few humans before he had disappeared. There had been a human superhero of that name, some seemed to think; had Lightning Man been a myth based upon this, or even a mortal construct to inspire others to fight?

There were a few more stories about the _Lightning Lady_, who had also been called _Phoenix_, like the city though with more relation to the myth; the Colorado story involved her creating a sheet of living flame to prevent the redirection of a river. She had ridden a chariot of fire—this was something else in human myth, he heard—and spitted thousands of invaders upon her sword of Excalibur. She sounded powerful (he wondered why she was called Lightning Lady, because Fiery Lady might have been more appropriate), but she was just as gone as the others.

_Lightning Boy _had been another fighter, they said—only a 'boy', he thought contemptuously; no wonder he was gone now—attempting to carry on the mantle of his adult compatriots. He had taught the human fighters a few secrets, he was told, which helped in some places, and had protected the innocent. In the Deep Snow he had used his powers to spark a generator into spilling out heat again.

The _Virus_, also called _Terminator_, had been either a giant or a dwarf, oddly enough. It was in him that Kilobyte had the most interest, because his powers had been over machinery, and apparently had been greater than his own gift of fusion and draining. Though, of course, if he was dead he had obviously not used them well. Minions had once arrived in concentrated force upon a large human city—his sources could not agree on which one this was—and he had placed his mind inside all the machinery of it, and used it to mount a coordinated defence against the massed foes. He had also taken on the terrifying Behemoth, and Tex The Giant, and defeated them with either his great strength or immense intelligence. And he had used the human defences' own machinery, and modified them for the especial purpose of defeating minions in newly known efficient ways. He had been defeated in a glorious last stand against the demon harpies, they said, though Kilobyte doubted the word 'glorious'. The harpies had attacked the hero from the air and torn him to pieces.

He was none of the four reborn, he was satisfied, whatever legends had to say about promises of heroes returning. He asked about other humanoids that had been there, if any, and received only tangled versions of skeletal monsters and black-armoured conquerors stalking the night. He was no closer to learning what he truly was, but he knew more about the past, and unlike these heroes he would shape his own future.

It was just another wire running through the roof of a drier underground area, powering some street light or telegraph or other mortal device; he was scavenging alongside a deformed mortal known only as Kipper, searching for mortal valuables mixed with their refuse. It had been several hours since he had last had access to electricity, and though Kipper seemed to want to move on, he grasped it with a tentacle and drew its energy into him, out of habit following it upwards to see what it powered.

A complex machine, he realised, more complicated than any he remembered, and the knowledge of it sent another supernova into his brain, bringing back to him a sense of the power he had once been. It had a hundred and one circuits and too much information flowing through them for him to comprehend, dazzling through his body like bright water. He stopped moving for a second, caught in it all like an insect who had blundered through a trap; the machine was magnificent to him, teaching him about memory and power, but at the same time there was something connected to it that he wanted to forget, a terror from machines like this and what they had done to him once, _creator, created, fight, destroy_, the fear of _nothing, controlled, ridiculous, worthless_, the hate that coursed through him like boiling tar in the veins he was not sure he possessed.

_I am Kilobyte_.

_I am nobody's creation._

_I will have my revenge._

It was too much for him, this dizzying plunge into memory and storm; he tried to withdraw from it, but the energy was flowing through him still, and the information buzzing around him trapped him. He _wanted_ to remember, needed to learn this which held him in such paralysing shock, needed to take possession of this machine and its powers and use it to kill every mortal that had brought him to this point…

Something hit him on the face, for the fourth time, and he finally withdrew from it to see Kipper turn away and keep moving.

He followed, still in a daze, and had no more thoughts of destruction.

--

_Computer_, he learned gradually, was an old word from before the war, a device that had led to man's doom. They were not used and rarely spoken of, though it was rumoured that some government installations still kept a few that they needed and were confident of controlling. They were the most complex of all machines; information rushed through them at millions of pieces a moment, and when they were connected into a vast, worldwide network there was even more information available.

It was this capacity that had led to them playing a large role in the service of the invaders, who had been creatures not dissimilar to drawings connected somehow with the machines. There had been an order to destroy all computers given a few years into the war, which, desperate for any solution to the holocaust, most had obeyed, and still suffered from the prohibition. Some mortals were fools, he thought; why had they destroyed such powerful things on the off-chance there was a connection to their enemies?

It was such a machine, he was certain, that he had happened upon; it was the only possibility that fit the description of the network he had glimpsed, the only one that could bring back his memories of a vast mortal network somehow connected to himself.

The network was to him…an echo, of his own powers? A mother, birthing a creature such as himself? An information storehouse, of memories he needed to reclaim? Whether the true answer was one of these or something he could not yet comprehend, he knew his quest had changed, and from then on his goal was to discover another of these nexuses of information.

--

News of the outside world took some time to spread down underground. Through some wires, though, he could perceive the occasional telegraphed conversation, and listened in whenever he bothered, honouring some of his underground companions' requests for outside news. _Rebuilding development downtown, poisoned territory three hundred miles square in Colorado, five thousand new recruits this year to keep order_. It was relevant, he supposed, to this world, but it was nothing of any importance to him. He admired the philosophy of the underground dwellers who concentrated solely on their own survival, but he could not imitate it. If it was not for this listening, he would become nothing but yet another creature struggling for survival beneath the ground.

And there was always that edge of memory, teetering as though at the corner of his vision, closer to him every time he completed an energy drain, aching for the merging that would bring it to his mind at last.

It was this he searched for.

He went deeper into the mortal networks, feeling his way up the wires and to the power sources, travelling further and further until he would be suddenly stopped by a break in the line.

"We don't get much news from the north," Teresa told him. "They reckon it's gonna split again, like way back. Civil War, they taught me in school, back when there were schools here."

"The connections were lost during the war?" he asked. They sat side by side on a thick railing, looking down in the darkness at the dirty river flowing beneath them.

"Hell yeah. Some of 'em went for the phone lines like crazy. Big groups of who-knows-what pulling down the lines and eating cables from the ground. Like you. Nobody didn't see that."

"So that's why I can't get through."

"Don't sweat it, big guy. Rebuilding and government enforcers and stuff here come in handy, but you think any of us need to know what's happening down in DC here?"

"I think it could help me remember."

She laughed. "Oldest excuse in the book, tentacle man. You really think half of us down here believe you've forgotten everything?"

"Then why do you still allow me among you?"

"You let us alone, we let you alone. We got nothing to lose. And it's not like bullets stop you."

He nodded. "I see."

He tried, anyway, for the challenge of seeing how far he could go to drain, picking up secret telegraph news from government crackdowns to statewide aid agreements to all that was going into rebuilding a world that had been shattered. He learned the paths through stuttering generators that took him further afield, carrying him along the network and above, through to more power and more information he stored away, getting to know more of the minion creatures and occasionally the humanoid heroes, and where the secret information of government was passed along telegraph lines.

It was an official summons for attendance, on a line somewhere to the north-east, to travel to the capital; comparatively rare and not offering much use to him, but important enough to the country to bother deciphering. What separated this from fifty other summons of this sort was that the details were not mentioned, merely an unknown substance: _the electrum_. It sparked nothing in his memories, but it vaguely intrigued him; no mortal could hide their activities, clandestine or otherwise, from _him_. And yet there was no further information given as he travelled to the transmission point, and he had never heard the word used before.

He thought nothing of it until he heard it mentioned again, urgently, in the context of _secure building material needed immediately from mines_.

_Electrum_. The word reminded him of _electricity_. Were they merely trying to rebuild an old network? He would have heard more about it, surely, and as grand-scale saboteurs were few in these times there was no need for such caution.

The third clue came three weeks later, as he roamed the sewers with Pia, a girl in Teresa's gang with a long tail and fur on her cheeks.

_Trial starts on the nineteenth. Convict her._

Not a building project. An entity. Referred to with a word sounding like 'electricity'. Who required secure building material.

She was like him, he had to believe.

After Pia had given up on rousing him from his trance, he concentrated on the network, and created a human-looking vehicle for himself.

--

His journey was many times longer than any he could recall, even when he sped as fast as he could over empty dirt tracks. He knew where he was going; his time in the human networks had taught him the direction of the capital, and it was a simple matter of finding the largest and fastest roads. The human land was larger than he had expected, enormous with many different views that he had not known about, and with many traces of the war's devastation.

The capital, it seemed, was in the process of rebuilding; he spotted many large half-finished structures, and despite himself was impressed by the human architecture as he progressed as quickly as he could towards his goal. The sewers and alleyways were once again his destination, though his ultimate plans were far larger.

It was a trial, he had heard; in the time it had taken him to arrive, it was an execution. The news was on the streets and would have been easily accessible to him even if he had not possessed powers: the last known invader was in custody, found guilty of genocide and currently being studied by scientists so that more like her could be defeated.

Perhaps it was true that she was as responsible for the war's devastation as any other invader; he knew nothing to suggest otherwise. But she was the only other creature on this world like himself, and even if he afterwards had to forcefully subdue her, he would rescue her no matter what it took.

There were more power networks here than in Phoenix, every one of them flashing with news of her, and it took him scarcely a minute to track down the secure facility in which she was held, though he could not discover more exact information. To know her holding cell would be necessary; it was a large place, and he could not be expected to force every lock open.

Travelling closer to the facility, he was able to get a direct lock into the building's power, and cast out among its wires for any sign of a person like himself. There was nothing that could be said to distinguish her holding area; he could sense lighting wires and various pieces of machinery, but nothing else that showed where their most important prisoner was held. He thought, continuing to let himself flow into the wires, preparing to drain the necessary energy from them, considering what humans might do to imprison a being such as himself.

And then he saw it: an area not covered by the networks, a blankness in the middle of bright and so very useable power, and he knew he had his answer.

There was no point in waiting. His rescue attempt would have to be tonight.

He reached for the power, and drained all the energy that he could, leaving it in darkness and chaos, and then advanced.

The mortals were soft and easy to defeat. He forced the metal doors open, paying no heed to the mortal defences that slammed into his body; they would not harm him. He heard yells and cries, but with no power it would be some time before help would arrive; it was certainly enough time for him to act.

He ran down the corridors, using his knowledge of the power of the place to navigate, able to see as well in the dark as in the light. It was easy, he thought as he lashed out with a tentacle to throw another human guard into the wall; these could not stand against him.

A heavy door guarded the entrance to her prison; he tried to give it the same treatment as the others, but it did not yield to his first attacks. A guard yelled something behind him, and then a cloud of smoke sprang up. He ignored it, not breathing; even so, the fumes found their way into his body, causing his vision to start to spin around him. He put a final effort in, using all the strength he possessed, focusing himself to the lock of the cell. There was a crack, finally, as more smoke bloomed around him. He put an arm up to his face in a futile effort to block it, too late, he knew.

The human weaponry hurt, now, relentlessly finding his form, blast after blast that added up to deadly force. He could not make out the words that were yelled around him, the high screams and pathetic groans.

Something blue flashed through the darkness growing around him, whistling past his arm and leaving a burn there, yet another injury.

_Failure_, he thought, _creation worth nothing after all._

Something took hold of him. It was a disgrace to be humbled by a weak mortal; he struggled to get himself to make one final stand, not to be taken down like a beast.

He raised an arm, trying to throw the mortal off him; they clung like a limpet, and with his arm as heavy as lead it would have been far easier to give up. But he hadn't been made that way.

"Hold on!" someone said to him. "Get back or I'll fire. I really mean it!"

There was more blue fire, and more human screams. He realised the smoke had begun to dissipate.

"This way!" The mortal was dragging him somewhere, a warm body pulling him along. "I think."

"Fire! Kill them both!"

"I don't want anyone to die!"

Another human weapon hit, but he and the mortal had toppled over to get out of its path. He saw blue in the corner of his eye, and heard more screams, and then came the smell of roasted flesh. His world went dark.

--

"Get _up_!" Something hit his face, hard; he looked up to see something red-gold above him, which then resolved itself into a dandelion-like shock of hair above a pink face. "We've got to go. Please, we've got to go before we kill more people, hurry." The voice sounded like it was on the verge of tears, hysterical and frightened.

It wasn't a mortal, he realised. She was like him. It was all in the skin texture, like he had been told, smoother and less complicated, but right now with mortal-looking tears running down it…

"You've got to get up before the reinforcements arrive." She was tugging on his shoulders, trying to raise him from the ground. "You can black out once we're at the safehouse, but come with me now, whoever you are. Please."

He levered himself from the ground, and ran a hand down his body to dislodge some of the mortal bullets lodged there. "Let's go," he said.

They ran through the prison; he had neutralised most of the guards during his entrance, and they had not been able to easily call for help.

"Left is the way out, I think," she said, panting beside him. "It's too dark…" He was dragging her along by her forearm, both to help her keep pace and follow the correct route.

"I went right. It's where I left my vehicle."

"Okay. We'll go there." She followed him; it was costing her some effort to keep up, but they could not afford delays.

"Halt!" A group of guards were in the passage in front of them, carrying a light; the brightness of it hurt him, but he knew what he had to do.

Neither of them stopped. As the guards fired, he pushed the non-human behind himself, and used a tentacle to sweep all three of them from the ground. The bullets peppered the walls around them and impacted upon his armour, but did not harm them.

He destroyed the light, crushing it and taking its energy, and reached for the guards again. They had tried to destroy him and his compatriot, and they would pay for it. It felt like the red that had seemed to take over his mind when he had destroyed the thugs, and as the mortals screamed he welcomed it.

"Stop!" the non-human called to him. "They're not attacking us any more!" She grabbed his tentacle, taking it off its intended path and forcing him to let the mortal fall to the ground.

He was shocked at the interference, at the strength greater than any human's; he withdrew, letting thought reclaim his mind.

"Stop," she said again, still sobbing. "We don't kill unless we have to, we just want to get out of here."

"They would have destroyed us." One of the mortals was still conscious; he knocked him out with a quick flip of a tentacle.

"That _doesn't matter_!" She gripped his arm, pulling him along the corridor. "Where did you say you left your car?"

"Out. Follow me." They were nearly at the exit now, only two more passages to go. He ripped through the wall to save time, leaving a vast hole; outside, there were more humans gathering.

"This way," he told her, pulling her behind a large fence post with him. "We're off."

He glanced back, and saw humans swarming around the building, carrying out their dead and wounded. He made a dash for the vehicle once he was sure nobody was looking directly at them.

_A success_, he thought, as he used his dwindling power reserves to start the vehicle.

"We'll go underground to hide," he told her brusquely. "I need to get my power back."

She nodded, gripping the seat tightly as they sped off, almost unnoticeable in all the chaos.

--

The mortals had actually managed to do him some damage, he reflected bitterly as he began an energy drain. He would recover soon enough, but he would not allow this to happen again.

And, with one like himself at his side, this would not be a concern.

She did not like the underground filth, he could tell by the expression on her face as she had realised where they were; this human refuse and remainder of refuges was not familiar to her.

"May I power up?" she asked when he was done.

He stepped aside.

"Can you please bring it down for me?" she asked. "I can't fly."

Of course; he should have noticed that. He brought down the wire with a tentacle and passed it to her. "Can you draw energy from mortals as well?" he asked her.

"No!" she said in what seemed like horror. "I can't, and I'd never." She turned wide blue eyes on him, looking almost frightened. "Can you? _Do_ you?"

"Only to those who have tried to harm myself and mine," he said. "Such as the guards." He had not needed to prey on randomly chosen mortals; it would have been a waste, he thought, and some of them had treated him fairly.

She shook her head nervously, still wide-eyed. "Did you…kill them?" she asked.

"I'm...not sure. I was going as quickly as I could." It was the truth; he had not bothered to check whether the humans he had immobilised had been destroyed or not, but he suspected she would not have found his estimates very pleasing. "They would have destroyed you."

"Yes, but…we only destroy minions who are trying to kill innocents. I'm a Lightning Knight. That's what it's about." She seemed to stand a little straighter as she mentioned the term, looking almost majestic in her orange human garb.

"You're Lightning Lady?" he asked. He had been told that the hero had been destroyed long ago, but that was the only name he knew that fit the girl in front of him.

"My name's Elektra," she said. "Elektra Mirage. Lightning Lady was…well, she hated the nickname, but she was my mother." She sighed, and took herself from the energy source. "You can't just go around killing everyone in your way," she continued. "We're supposed to save the world."

"Save it from what?"

"Everything," she said, staring at him in disbelief. "The minions nearly took over. There was so much destroyed. We've got to set things right again."

An idealistic, romantic quest, he thought. She was almost like a mortal. Perhaps she had been imprisoned too long.

"That's why you were sent to save me," she continued. "We've got a chance."

"I wasn't sent," he told her. "I merely wanted to find someone like yourself. Tell me, what are we?"

"I didn't mean ordinary sent," she said, reaching her hand to her chest to grip something underneath her top. "But don't you know?"

"I have few memories of the past." It felt weak, admitting this to someone who looked and behaved almost like a young mortal, this earnest, round-faced girl, but he had no choice if he wished to know.

"I'll tell you where a safehouse is," she said. "Where it'll be clean. It's a long story."

He sighed. She was a weakling; he would have assumed her to be a minion rather than something more like himself had she not identified herself as a hero's daughter. "Very well," he said.

--

"It belongs to Uncle Brett," she told him, sitting next to him and giving him directions that had already forced him to make two wrong turnings. "He was around before everything happened. There are so many stories about everything wonderful in the old days, all the tall buildings that humans built and new technology and peace on earth."

"What was the everything that happened?" he asked her, cutting her off mid-flow.

"My parents appeared one day, out of the Sixth Dimension," she said. "It was a human's invention, but they were still people," she added firmly. "We're all created."

_Mortal creation._ The thought still hurt him; he had to be _more_ than some creature dreamed up by a mere human. Perhaps he was more than Elektra's parents had been; if she was a hero, he was not.

"They fought minions, because they wanted to save the world," she went on. "There were lots of battles, but they won every one of them. And then she fell in love with my father…"

He did not want to hear the details of whatever emotions had bound Elektra's parents; the fact that they had reproduced was sufficient information. "Was this uncle of yours there?"

"He was there, but he was younger than me then, and he didn't find out about it all until the war began."

"He is one of us too?"

"No, human; he took care of me after my mother died." The memory of the dead parent saddened her; her emotions were written on her face, as easy to read as writing. _Weakness_.

"The war. How did it start?"

"The Cyber Stalker. He was a new creation, the Master Programmer's work, more powerful than my parents. He held the Master Programmer captive for a time, but the Master Programmer broke free and merged the worlds together. And then the war began." She shivered.

"Minions flowed onto Earth, devastating everything they could find. I've heard."

"Yes. And then the fading started." She paused as they drove up a dark street filled with shambling houses. "We're there," she said.

The house she indicated was dark, and seemed to be deserted after a careful look around it.

"I…don't like this," Elektra said.

"It's empty," he told her.

"Then we'll go in." She pushed open the door with a resolute look on her face, and they stumbled into a ruined area.

Several of the floorboards had been ripped out, and the walls too had holes ripped in them; loose papers had been flung over the floor, and a desk overturned. Someone had been searching for something.

"They found him," Elektra said, sitting down next to the desk and pulling her knees to her chin. "I hoped he'd escape. But they got him."

More reasons for moral enmity, then.

"Do you know where they would have taken him?" he asked. There would be no chance of being able to find a human as he had done for Elektra, but if she knew, he could mount another rescue mission for someone with information.

She shook her head. "No, I don't." Moisture slid down her face from her eyes; she impatiently wiped it away. "I thought he'd live. He was like a father to me, helping me when my mother couldn't…" She buried her head in her lap and wept. He did not know how to stop her, and contented himself with observing the contents of the human's former domain.

It would not have been poorly appointed; it was still more luxurious than the underground's facilities, and contained more pieces of furniture than Sam and Em had possessed. As he wandered through it, he saw that the humans had discovered at least one of the secrets they searched for: a ripped floorboard led to an underground passage. He peered into it, examining what secrets it yet held; it had once contained machinery, it appeared from the destroyed wires on the ground, and the remnant of something very heavy that had laid there. There was also an adjoining room near it, small, with a ripped mattress and smashed shelf inside; a hiding place suitable for Elektra, he guessed.

"What was in the secret passage?" he asked her upon his return.

"Somewhere to hide me in case the soldiers came knocking," she replied sadly. "And the project."

"What project?"

She stood. "I thought I was the only one who could restore the worlds," she said. "But now you're here, I know I'm not. You need to help me go back to the Sixth Dimension so I can wipe out everything that happened to this world."

She walked over to the window, staring out at it towards the dark shapes of houses and the sputtering street lamps. He would have suspected her of deliberately using the dramatic gesture, had she not appeared so naïve. "This world was ruined twenty years ago. There were almost a billion deaths—can you believe that, a _billion_? All innocent people. This world was destroyed." She turned back to him. "It's the reason why I was born."

"It's been ten years since the last big battle," he said. "There are still many humans—and few of us."

"We faded," she said. "Thank God the minions did, eventually. This world isn't for people like us, and because the worlds were forced together we couldn't survive. I thought I was the last until you saved me." She managed a small smile. "And now all we have to do is to find our way back into the Sixth Dimension and save the world."

"Who else do you know who could be of use?"

"Rebecca. She's our last hope. I just hope she's where I think she is."

--

It was another long journey; frustrated by Elektra's timidity at his choice of speed, he chose to travel at his own pace anyway so that they would arrive in the area in a single day rather than three. Like so many other places across the world, the surrounding country bore the signs of war, land burned and destroyed and mortal cities twisted and fallen, no longer rising proudly to the skies as Elektra told him they had once done.

"Her name's Rebecca," Elektra told him as they slowed down, passing through human territory. "She's one of the humans who helped look after me, a scientist before the war. She worked on the portal."

Rebecca; the name meant nothing to him, but she was only a human after all. "Was she the Master Programmer?" he asked.

"No, of course not. The Master Programmer was a guy, and he was evil," she said. "I told you he merged the worlds."

_Master Programmer_. The phrase sounded sinister to him; perhaps he should have known it, or had once, a long time ago. Had he indeed been another creation of this programmer's, created like the rest of them? He ignored the threatening thought. "There was nobody like me, back then?" he asked instead.

"Not that I know of. You're not evil, and you're not a Knight…" She smiled at him. "Maybe you're an angel."

"Mortal myth." He knew vaguely what the word meant, a useless human tale.

"How do you know?" She turned her oversized blue eyes on his face. "We're here, aren't we? That would have been seen as a miracle too. We can't say it's just a myth."

"You believe in these angels?" he asked impatiently.

"Yes," she said firmly. "We can't see them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I'm a Christian," she added.

He knew of the religion symbolised by the cross hanging around her neck; it was more myth and tale, fairytale nonsense that made no rational sense. "More mortal dreams," he said.

"It's _not_. There were hundreds of witnesses to Jesus rising from the dead, and lots of evidence that a world as wonderful as this was especially created. I can tell you more about it if you want…"

"I'm more interested in the evidence of our world's creation." If a god the human equivalent of the Master Programmer had ever existed, he had long disappeared from this world.

"The Sixth Dimension?" She shrugged. "I've never been there, but it's supposed to be chaotic. Filled with evils. And it has the lost amulet pieces, which I have to find and recombine."

"Amulet…?"

She grinned at him. "I'll tell you if you slow down on the next stretch of road."

--

The Sixth Dimension, created as mortal entertainment. The Amulet of Zoar, the powerful artefact key to its control. The heroes and villains, forced out of it and forced back into it and forced to fight on the fused Earth. The combined worlds no longer granting any of the inhabitants a second chance in the Sixth Dimension. The fading as the worlds began to split again.

"What happened to the Master Programmer in the end?" he asked, trying to keep his mind from the 'mortal entertainment' factoid.

"He died in the war he started. Nobody's ever heard of him since he merged the worlds."

"Good." It would have been better if he had killed this programmer himself with a tentacle around his throat, the death of a self-serving creator, but this was sufficient.

"I think so, yes," Elektra said, a little doubtfully. "He was…not a good person, though it's not good when people die."

A trite sentiment. He thought of the bloodlust that had consumed him. He had never taken an unnecessary life, though some humans were deserving of a painful death.

"And is your Rebecca a programmer too?"

"She was before the war. She never did anything to us, though. She's good, and with your powers as well she'll get the portal working."

"Why do you wish to go back to a chaotic world?" He felt that he could find what he was looking for in the world that had likely birthed him, but the girl's insistence on returning there was a different matter.

"When I put together the amulet pieces I can control the Sixth Dimension. The worlds are still linked, because we're both still here. And that way I can reset the game."

"The _game_." He loathed the word.

"Yes," she said, not noticing his expression. "I've got to turn it back to before the fusion and bring back everyone who died. All the humans, Uncle Random, Ashley, Auntie Janice, my parents…"

"Before you were born." _And before I appeared._

She bit her lip. "Yes. I don't know what'll happen then. Maybe I'll be born again differently, or maybe just still be there. But it's what I have to do."

"A Lightning Knight," he said.

"It's what I was born to be." She looked out of the window. "We're nearly there. Take the next left."

The human programmer was where Elektra had hoped, a dark-skinned woman with a twisted scar dividing her face in two and snow-white hair with a single black streak, and under cover of evening ushered them into her home.

"Who are you?" she asked him sharply, eyeing him up and down. "Anomaly. I don't know how you could be here."

"He saved me," Elektra said. "And he said he'd help me get back to the Sixth Dimension."

"I did not say," he corrected. "But nonetheless I will return to our original world."

Rebecca nodded. "Fine," she said. "Any special skills?"

"I drain energy. And feel my way through networks."

"It's something. Elektra, go use the power source. I'll be asking our guest a few pointed questions."

The girl nodded, and did as the human asked.

"Sit down," Rebecca commanded. "You'll forget to stoop and crash into my ceiling."

He obeyed; sitting was more comfortable than standing in this small mortal dwelling. "What do you know about what I am?" he said.

"You're not human, from the Sixth Dimension, probably one of the only two in the world who haven't faded. I don't know your face or how you got here."

"I woke up in a cave a few months ago. In Arizona. Elektra was on the networks and I came here. I remember nothing about how I came here."

"Or your past?" she asked crisply.

He shook his head; he would not bother to recount the fragmented recollections the network had given him. It sounded ridiculous.

"You're a puzzle. Humanoid sentient, not a game evil, not a Knight. Brett might have known more, but I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you're the Master Programmer's last-minute effort who woke up once his fusion was weak enough."

"I am not his creation." It had to be true, surely.

"If it makes you feel any better, Elektra thinks humans were created too. You really want to return to the Sixth Dimension?"

"I have to. I must find who and what I am." And he had nowhere else to go, but he would not tell the woman that.

"Not working for the government? Not some constructed copy based on whatever they did to Elektra? Not some evil who's actually learned smarts?"

"I do not think I am." A government construction would not have wakened on the other side of the country, and the evils had not looked like him.

"Thinking's not good enough. Are you?"

"I am not."

She sniffed, still unsatisfied by his answers. "Like you'd tell the truth if you were." She stood up. "I need coffee. The power's in the second door on the right. Wait until Elektra's finished."

"What does she think of you?" Elektra asked with some interest.

"She trusts me enough to allow me to power up in her house," he said. "But she does not know who I am."

"I'm sorry," she said. She put a hand gently on his arm. "We'll be able to find out in the Sixth Dimension, I think."

_Thinking's not good enough._ "So I would like to believe. Is your Rebecca to be trusted?"

"Of course. She lost her husband and three of her daughters in the war. She wants us to succeed."

It wasn't quite the answer he wanted, but he nodded anyway, concentrating for the moment on regaining his energy levels.

--

"Brett had the device," Rebecca said, sipping a cup full of steaming liquid. Next to her, Elektra also held a cup containing some brown substance; mortal habits had rubbed off on her. _Unnecessary._

"I know. I think they took it. But you have the information on file, don't you?" Elektra said.

Rebecca seemed to hesitate slightly. "Yes. But not the equipment to construct it. Or a guarantee it'll work this time."

"We have to try," Elektra told her. "We have his powers to help us."

"You mentioned you have this information on file," he said. "Is this part of a network?"

"Part of my very illegal computer," Rebecca corrected. "You don't know enough about tech."

She was probably…right, he realised; she had more memory and experience than he, but she did not understand the true scope of his powers.

"I created my own vehicle using my powers," he said. "Show me these files and I will see what I can construct."

"Very well." Rebecca laid down her cup with a _clink_ and stood to show him to the files.

It was a network device, he thought as he surreptitiously brushed a tentacle over one of its ports, wires and circuits forming one complicated whole, something with memory files to spare and a link to his unknown past.

Rebecca pushed a button and stood back to wait as the circuits configured themselves. He added some of his own power to the mix so that it would function more quickly, working himself into a gradual understanding of the electrically powered device.

"Look away," Rebecca commanded abruptly; he did so as she typed a combination of letters on the keypad. "Okay. It's here." She called up a basic design on screen; he absorbed it both with his eyes and his body. "Scroll down for further specs by pressing this button. I'm going back to Elektra."

It was simple to download the files into his memoryspace, though it was less simple to understand them. He still did not understand precisely what the Sixth Dimension was; how was he meant to understand the portal that would transport him there?

He decided to search the computer for further information, running through the rest of Rebecca's files; it took him several minutes to happen upon a folder entitled 'game'.

_Game. A mortal game. Am I reduced to this?_

Thousands of visual images in there, simplified lines and bright colours typical of creatures such as himself, character biographies—_Ace Lightning, all-American hero, Random Virus, unpredictable and dangerous_—it truly was a game, he knew at last, a fantastically created world for mortals' amusement. It offended him.

_I am not merely a game_, he told himself, _not from here but some other origin…_

_Some other _created_ origin, the Master Programmer or some other interfering mortal…_

_I _know_ this_, he thought. _I remember none of what was programmed into me, released upon the world as a blank slate to experience it anew, fighting for _myself.

_If I ever find the Master Programmer I will destroy him_, he vowed. _He wished to use us as creatures and not creations._

His understanding of the nature of the Sixth Dimension was now complete, and with it, many portions of the Portal's logic. His goal remained the Sixth Dimension, the original world; he refused to hide from the fact of the unreality, and was resolved to find the complete truth about himself. _Then I will break whatever has programmed me._

He was interrupted by a loud crash and a faint cry from the other room, and broke his concentration from the computer to listen.

"Bullets can hurt Elektra. Would this hurt you?"

The human. Rebecca. He could recognise her voice, but the words were wrong from her. Somehow she had sneaked up on him, and was pressing something cold to the back of his head.

"I'm betting you couldn't heal from a shot like this."

"Why are you doing this?" he asked. Was it something he had done to her machine?

He heard Elektra cry out again, and knew it was more serious than that.

"Elektra trusted you," he said. "What did the other humans promise?"

"I didn't have a choice. I wanted Elektra to succeed, I really did. But they have my youngest child imprisoned." She pressed the gun more firmly against his skull. "Let's stop talking. Give up now and you can live to try again."

"You're correct. There isn't a choice."

He flung himself forward, smashing her machine, ignoring the shot that singed the top of his head. One of his tentacles rose up from the ground to leech onto her wrist; she screamed, firing shots in every direction.

They weren't bullets, he noticed. They were blue.

"I will try again," he told her as he secured his hold on her with another tentacle. "Using your energy."

Her body convulsed as he activated the drain ruthlessly, not caring about giving her pain. She had betrayed him, and he had no reason to grant mercy.

She was almost a corpse, little more than a drained shell, when he released her in disgust. There was a second rescue to complete.

A blue cage was in the room, an energy-net trapping Elektra behind it; she was firing at it from her wrists, but it only absorbed the energy from her. The humans surrounding her had weaponry similar to hers, the blue flame that hit him harder than bullets; _so _this_ is what they imprisoned her for_, he understood as he started the attack.

The energy-net imprisoning Elektra had an obvious source point, protected by strands dancing over it; he reached that with a tentacle, ignoring the pain of both it and the blasts he received.

He lashed out with a thick arm, knocking a human hard into the opposite wall. A red stain ran down it as he went for two others with a tentacle, throwing them together and taking their energy from them.

There was a twist to undoing the control of Elektra's cage; he had to _think_, to draw the right amount of energy from it to stop it from activating, to ignore the pain of it.

She flopped onto the floor with a cry, exhausted by her efforts. He paid her no heed as he fought.

He was _better_ than these mortals. He drained them, taking their energy to continue fighting them, throwing them to the ground when he was done with them and paying no heed to their cries. They had stolen energy from him, and he returned the favour willingly.

He stopped when nobody was moving any more, bar Elektra, levering herself slowly from the ground.

"Are they…?" she asked, staring around herself at the humans.

"Mostly, not dead." He could have destroyed them all, lost himself in that fury of bloodlust, but he had not; perhaps the self-control was a defiance of whatever had been programmed into him.

"Rebecca?" She peeled herself off the ground and stared around with a worried look.

"Not dead. Will wish she was when she wakes up. Let's get out of here." He pulled her along with him, grabbing what energy he could from the house before starting up the vehicle. He didn't have enough power to maintain it for long, he realised dazedly; the battle and the new human weapons had taken a lot from him despite what he had drained.

"What happened?" she asked him. "Everything's all fuzzy for me."

_The drink she had. _ "It'll pass. Rebecca betrayed you. We will find the nearest power station and head for the Sixth Dimension."

Her face seemed to light up. "You know what to do?"

"Yes." He did not mention his uncertainties. "We just need enough power."

"I don't know where it is," she said unhappily. "And it'll be protected…"

"I know." He had traced Rebecca's line back to its source. As to the mortal protections, they would get past them easily enough. "I wish I understood why you still wish to save such creatures."

"They're _not all bad_. They're frightened, because of what the minions did to them. And some people aren't nice, but neither are we. I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, nobody is. Haven't you met any good mortals?"

The sermonising irritated him. "A few," he told her. "Not a majority."

"They're not evil," she said, "some of them are kind, even when I was imprisoned there were a few guards who'd bring me books and things, I was brought up by humans…"

"Who subsequently betrayed you."

"No!" She punched him on the arm, hard. "It's not like that. Bad things happened while I was in prison. Rebecca made sure we powered up and you knew the plans, didn't she?"

He considered it. "Perhaps, but more likely she was attempting to win our confidence."

Elektra sighed heavily, shifting in her seat. "She's not evil. Hardly any humans are."

A melodramatic word, evil. No doubt there was complexity involved; he himself had killed, and many mortals were also of the sort who helped some and harmed others.

"Perhaps not. But they may still be our foes." He increased the speed of the vehicle, to seek their goal rather than waste time in this debate.

A heavy fence topped by barbed wire surrounded and protected the power plant; the mortals wished to protect their place, no doubt from intruders in battles gone by. It would not stop him.

"What's the plan?" Elektra asked, staring up at the boundary.

"The direct approach." It was late in the night now, and no doubt more human forces would be on their trail; they would have to move quickly. "First I bring down an external cable to power up, then we get going." He started moving as soon as he spoke, reaching up with a tentacle to rip down a wire stretching above them. Elektra grasped it as he also drained it, and then they began.

A night watchman was the first to run up to them, a blinding light in his hand; Elektra fired and the light went out, but the watchman had cried for help and a loud alarm was ringing around them.

The walls were heavy and barbed-topped; Kilobyte slammed his body into the padlocked gate to force it to collapse. It cost him some effort, and around him too-bright lights had started to flash an alarmed red. A second attempt, and they were in as the humans started to fire their first shots.

The door was before him; he ignored the bullets as Elektra fired low-intensity pulses at their sources. It was metal, sealed with a heavy lock; he ripped away the lock to shove open the door, and they continued into the sanctum.

It was thankfully dark inside, and would remain so; he reached up a tentacle to access the light fitting, projecting his drain to douse the rest of the lights available. Elektra stared around, lost in the blackness, but he reached out to lead her along.

"Quiet," he told her. "I can see in the dark; they can't."

She opened her mouth to reply, but thought better of it and simply nodded.

The main power was in the centre of the structure; a design that suited needs for drama. It would still be easy enough for them to conquer.

The mortals were catching up, coming through the doors and firing in his direction while Elektra kept up her own random shots, neither side's aim particularly good in the night. He lashed out behind to knock some of them down, taking their energy as he did so; he would need all he could get to finish the mission.

Another night watchman reared up in front of them, another blinding light in his hand. He could not help crying out, attempting to shield himself from the blaze; a sign of weakness, he knew, that no doubt the humans would notice.

"Come on," he heard Elektra say, she leading him on further in the light. "Break down the door in front of you."

He smashed through it with a fist, using more force than necessary; they could not afford to be slowed.

The corridors were grey and ugly, utilitarian rather than attractive, where mortals manufactured the energy needed to maintain their broken world. They ran towards the central part of the structure, guided only by his impression of where the main power source came from; twice they had to backtrack their steps, making their way through the remaining human pursuers—they would have reinforcements soon no doubt, he thought, and took what energy he could.

"We've made it," Elektra said breathlessly as they found themselves on a long ramp above a large system of machinery. The interlocking systems generated steaming energy as they carried on their endless movement, all directed towards the single generator.

"You hold the humans off. I'll go down," he told her. He'd need to do this, create the portal himself. "If you lose too much power yell out."

"I'll make it. I'm using as little power as I can." Her face was grimly set as she fired her blasts, mostly just above the heads of the humans.

He launched himself to jump from machine to machine, navigating his path with care; he was not designed for such activity as this, and needed to concentrate all he could on getting past this obstacle course.

Elektra screamed when he was two-thirds of the way across. The human backup had arrived, with their energy-weapons stolen from her powers, and she hid herself behind protruding machinery to continue fighting, wounded though not yet beaten. The shots hit him too, but he was nearly to the central generator, and kept running.

"Hurry!" he heard Elektra yell, and increased his speed; _move faster, cog of one to cradle of next, dodge incoming fire, keep going at all costs…_

A blast hit him in the shoulder, a bit harder than the last few; he nearly fell below the generators, and only just managed to keep his balance. He was nearly there if more blasts didn't put him off, really just a few steps if he didn't have to navigate over and past all these machines. His next step was weak and uncertain, the machine he stood on all but throwing him underneath its sharp gears. He couldn't make it like this, not with the distractions and the need to balance, not this plan after all…

"Jessica!" he heard Elektra sing out. There was the sound of more shots, more human cries, and then what felt like a brief respite from blasting, just long enough for him to cross the remaining distance from his perch to the central generator.

He thrust a tentacle into the centre of the glowing nexus of power, and as he felt it all flow through him saw a new human standing beside Elektra, firing alongside her at their foes.

The power filled him and destroyed the factory at the same time, grinding every machine to a halt and throwing the building into complete darkness aside from his figure crackling with energy. The battle was over, and they had won; he felt more powerful than ever after this drain, able to take over the _world_ if he felt like it…

…(he didn't feel like it. Not really. He had to make the portal, not start killing lots of mortals.)…

…And he scanned his memory files for the exact design of Rebecca's portal, feeling for that place called the Sixth Dimension that he had so few memories concerning.

Elektra was running towards him through the now-dormant machinery, ready for what she had dreamed of for so long. "Rebecca got word out to Jessica. I told you she wasn't evil!" she called to him in glee as she ran.

It was a difficult, complex thing, and he barely listened to Elektra's words to him as he struggled to rationalise the prospect to his own satisfaction before he could force it to appear.

_My _home_, people like us, the dark side of the network, fused Earth…_

He concentrated on forcing it through, envisioning the connections and then making them come alive by the human power. It was bright blue, a spinning disc suspended in mid-air, the most wonderful thing he could remember creating, the way home.

The humans had given up shooting and were staring in shock instead; an older long-haired woman threw a salute to them both.

"Leave while you still can!" she yelled.

Elektra resolutely stepped up to the portal and placed a hand against it, prepared to leave the mortal world and travel into the next.

Nothing happened.

She looked up at him, bewildered. "Why isn't it working?"

He was attempting to discover the answer to the question himself; a connection problem, perhaps, some error or several in Rebecca's diagram…

"Try to remember the way back," Elektra advised him. "We never got the design right, but I believe you can." She stood tall, faithfully ready for departure.

He kept concentrating, harnessing the human power running through his body, tracing the connection lines and gateways and transfers. It needed to be catalytic, changing worlds, restoring them to where their people had originated. Could it have one too many connections? Not the right sort of connection? He had remembered but never learned this, and he only hoped he had sufficient energy resources to finish the task.

The long-haired human ran towards them, looking back every so often to check on the status of the other humans' pursuit. "What's happening?" she called out to Elektra, taking a stance comfortably far away from both of them.

"He's working on it, but he don't quite know how to do it," Elektra replied, softly.

"Oh." She stared at it, and walked to an angle where she could see behind it. "Who is…never mind. Have you tried rerouting the primary connection through human analogy?" she asked him.

"Yes."

"Calibrating spin time to match travel velocity and the n minus one bitsum?"

He checked it. "Yes."

"Compensated for the CGI/real world degeneration post-fusion?"

_So _that_ was what __the brown connection was for._ He had been thinking of it as if the worlds had never been fused—his memory, perhaps, of times before—and the deductions clicked together in his mind like interlocking gears.

There were only two left as Sixth Dimension representatives on this world; he could feel the connection between the worlds now, and understand its fading. The calculations had been correct, he realised—for the time in which they had been made.

He made that adjustment, and felt the warm air of the Sixth Dimension blow on his face.

"It's done," he said.

"Go now," the human who had helped them said to Elektra. "Do well."

"I'll miss you," she replied, and stepped into the other world.

"The connection…must stay open, if she wants to change both worlds," he told the human. The portal wrapped itself around him, blue strips pulling him into a centre as though he was a charge running along a human power line.

He was home.

--


	3. Part III

It was a strange world, the bright scenery disorienting and almost painful to watch; the ground shifted under him as he reached behind himself to fix open a few molecules' worth of the portal, so that the worlds would not be completely separated.

Elektra was some distance away from him already, a proud orange-suited figure making her own way across the hostile landscape. She finally saw him, and raised a hand to beckon him onwards. He walked across the shifting ground to meet her, and was shocked by the sudden appearance of a thing with teeth throwing itself up to the ground and attempting to bite through his leg. He ripped it away with a tentacle and threw it viciously into the side of the nearest hill, but it had done some visible damage to his outer covering, he noticed in irritation.

"Underminers," Elektra said. "Not that dangerous, but still nasty if there's a whole pack…"

Small holes were starting to pop up around them as though on direct cue to her words.

"Let's get out of here."

They walked from one dune to the next, and the sky's colour shifted as the landscape changed around them. The illogicality of it irritated him.

"It's in flux," Elektra said. "Like the mortal world, it was damaged during the war…"

A large reptilian shape screeched above them as it flew over the suddenly-much-higher sky.

"It's a Pendragon! Run!" Elektra grabbed his arm to pull him to cover.

Above their heads, the creature seemed to sense them, and gracefully turned in mid-air to approach them. It was bright gold in the light, with what looked like a crown on its head, smiling with long, sharp teeth as it headed for a kill.

Elektra fired at it, but none of her shots seemed to have any effect as the creature continued on its deadly flight. At the last minute, both of them ducked to one side against the hill, and the dragon went through it.

He stared, bewildered, at the large creature disappearing through the landscape; its tail flicked across his chest as it went, but he felt nothing.

Elektra looked equally shocked. "They are not normally intangible?" he asked.

"No. My parents fought these. They brought down the Golden Gate bridge. Why…" She shook her head. "Maybe we should just keep going."

"Do you know _where_?" The only memory this world seemed to be restoring him was a feeling of annoyance at it.

"No. But if we just move towards the centre, we should be fine. We're going to end up at the Haunted House, but we have to find amulet pieces along the way."

"And how are we supposed to recognise those?" Kilobyte queried, annoyed already by this ridiculous quest.

"They're powerful. We'll find them. I'll pray, too," Elektra said serenely.

One never seemed to get used to the changing lands, he thought as they marched along the closest equivalents to pathways they could find. The sky was an ugly shade of burned yellow-green now, with the ground a deep shade of blue that hurt your eyes if you looked at it for too long. There were howls and screams sounding somewhere in the distance, which faded and grew at different moments as they walked along. He had strangled an attacking minigator with a tentacle, though its fellows had been as intangible as the Pendragon.

Ahead of them was what seemed to be the remains of a city, a bone-white wall surrounding tattered tents and strange structures; no sounds came from it. Without discussing it between themselves they headed towards it. He was glad of the variation from the endless shifting hills.

The city's gate was painted a garish red and yellow, striped and polka-dotted and threaded with bright tinsel. It was unlocked, and he pushed it open to cautiously step through.

They walked through a juggler, silently throwing gold-and-silver balls up and down in the air, dropping one every few seconds yet still somehow keeping the same number in the air. The sky had changed to candyfloss-pink when they looked up again.

"The Circus," Elektra said in explanation. It had changed, but it was an area he recalled from his glimpses of Rebecca's game: a 'level', where the human player fought minions to get another piece of the amulet.

It was too quiet, he thought dourly; fighting minions would have at least freed him from this anticipation.

Elektra stilled beside him, and he looked to see what had startled her.

A green-skinned humanoid woman was creeping along the wall, looking around as though pursued; she did not appear to see them. Something seemed to strike her, pressing her body against the wall; she fought back, though, materialising something in her right hand and throwing it at the invisible foe, then starting to run into thin air…

"I know her," Elektra said, half to herself. "Lady Illusion."

Another character name he vaguely recalled from the game; he regretted, now, refusing to examine it further in his anger.

"I'm Mirage after her, to remember," Elektra said. "She _died_, before the war even began. Why is she…"

"A ghost?" Kilobyte supplied the appropriate mortal myth; with Elektra's dependence upon such things she ought to appreciate the definition.

"She _can't_ be. That's not what happens when people go, permanently…"

It wasn't, or at any rate not to mortals, though he suspected her ideas about what followed death were no more reasonable.

"You said this dimension was in flux," he said. "And you want to change the past. Perhaps it shows random parts of what happened here."

"That makes sense," Elektra said, looking happier. Then another thought seemed to strike her. "But she was killed in this dimension, and that might have been her last…" She bit her lip. "Let's go into the Big Top."

Kilobyte walked alongside the girl, observing the design of the circus arena; it seemed larger on the inside than on the outside, with patched-together sheets making it look like a structure pinned together across space and time.

Noise suddenly started around them, and a troupe of monkeys appeared in the centre of the tent, chattering and screaming.

"They're cute," Elektra said, a smile beginning to form on her face, and then she let out a shocked cry as one of them threw a pie at her. "Ouch!" She was flung onto the ground, skidding backwards as the yellowish substance clung to her face and jumpsuit.

Kilobyte advanced forward, preparing to scatter the monkeys; they ran off as he approached, apparently intimidated by his bulk.

Elektra pried herself off the ground. She dipped a finger into the pie mixture for a taste, and then promptly spat it out. "Yuck. I think it's poisoned." With a revolted look on her face, she tried to scrape off the mixture, which seemed to be immovable.

He saw some movement in the corner of his eye; he walked off after it, leaving Elektra to catch up to him. A tented passageway led through another intangible, a circus strongman admiring his muscles in the mirror as he hefted his dumbbell. Nothing special, after all; he waited for Elektra to catch up, and followed the passage through. A spinning blue disc was apparently a powerup for Elektra; it removed the food matter from her, and seemed to put her in slightly higher spirits.

"Back in the Big Top," Elektra said as they emerged at the other end.

Another example of this place's ridiculous geography. The colouring, though, had changed yet again; it seemed darker now, a dull red light highlighting the tent.

The air shimmered for a second, and minions appeared out of thin air; more monkeys and strongmen, clowns with sad faces and sadistic laughs, strange small creatures jumping around to prepare for attack…

…and two humanoids, running through it, a blond man and a red-haired woman with lightning insignia on their clothing.

Elektra's parents. He heard her gasp beside him.

They were clearly on the run, trying to make a path through all the minions surrounding them; the man was pulling the woman through, trying to get them both out.

"You go on, Ace," he heard her call to him. "I'll take care of these freaks."

"We're in this together," he told her. "This way. Strategic retreat." He blasted ahead of them to clear a path, and the two of them ran on.

Elektra stood in place, staring desperately at the two figures. "Let's follow them!" she said, clutching on to Kilobyte's arm and pulling him towards where they were fading into the passageway they had just exited. He went along with her, but the heroes had departed, leaving them alone once again.

"My _mother_." She was crying again, he noticed, but smiling through it. "I never thought I was going to see her again, but she was alive, you saw her too. And my father, I don't even remember him but they were both heroes like everyone said, the two of them fighting and doing so well, saving the world and kicking butt like she always used to say…"

"Look there." He pointed to the central pillar that had appeared in the middle of the Big Top following the heroes' departure. It was blue and white, almost a relaxing combination compared to the other garish décor, and bathed in a faint golden light. And on top of it was a small gold triangle, slowly spinning in the light.

"A piece of the Amulet of Zoar," Elektra said. She cautiously approached it, reaching out a hesitant hand to touch the light with her fingertips before finally grasping the amulet itself. "One down, I guess." The light disappeared and the pillar crumbled into dust as she examined the artefact she held in her hand. "It's…prettier than I expected," she said finally. "And powerful."

He did not need her to tell him how powerful it was; he could sense it, knowing all he could achieve with even a mere fragment of it. He craved it, but it would be more sensible for Elektra to bear it; she knew more of what they had to achieve here.

"Good. Now, shall we remove ourselves from the Circus?"

"Let's not go back where we came in," she said. She pointed to another gap in the tent. "We can try there instead."

They followed along, down another winding passageway he lost all sense of direction as it twisted and turned in some directions he knew were physically impossible.

"Roll up, roll up!" a booming voice startled them; they looked down to see that the floor had rippled and changed into a moving set of stairs. "Ready for the death-defying—well, more like death-dealing—Ride of Doom? Is that a no I hear? Guess what?—We don't care!"

The floor gave way under them, and they were flying along the so-called ride of doom, speeding past blurred walls and down quick-twisting tunnels; he heard Elektra scream as they were flung this way and that on the ride.

A wall approached them, a huge grey thing set on a collision course; he flung himself up as far as he could in the motion of the ride, throwing Elektra over it with a tentacle and only just passing it himself as his feet scraped the top of it. And then the ride continued to force them onwards, blurring their worlds and seeming to speed up time itself as they travelled along its hairpin curves and past its deadly spikes.

"How do we stop it?" Elektra called to him, her voice chopped to pieces by the wind blowing past them as their speed still increased. A spike seemed to fly dangerously close to her arm as she was flung over a black pit.

_I can control this_, was the first thought that sprang into his mind, from where he knew not. And he had no choice but to try; already he could feel the speed starting to wear down his body, travelling almost too fast to avoid the spikes and obstacles any more, flinging him from one out-of-control direction to the next.

Steeling himself for the pain, he threw down a tentacle into the moving ground below him. The impact was agony, but he kept it in place, feeling into the ground to get it to cease its wild movement. He threw down a second tentacle as though trying to nail it in place; his body shook, and he was no longer flying through the air. Elektra screamed as the change in motion flung her towards one of the spiked walls; he reached out a third to pull her from the air.

The floor shuddered beneath him, its intense motion continuing as though it was some mad beast whose only desire was to race until it tore itself apart. Yet his powers had some effect on it; he fell to the ground, no longer flung by the wind on a crazy voyage, Elektra landing some distance ahead of him. He set his hands and knees firmly on it, pushing down as much as he could; he had power, he told himself, power to refuse to be taken like this.

It shuddered under him, bucking like an insane bull; he kept his position, using his power to reach into it, crushing it beneath him. He did not know how long it took, his exhausted last attempts at concentration as the roller coaster kept pushing itself, but at long last it gave a final quiver and lay still, almost as defeated as he was.

"Are you okay?" Elektra, leaning over him; he shook his head to get rid of some of the tired fog of his brain, and slowly levered himself to his feet.

"I will be." He looked around, attempting to discern what sort of an environment they had discovered this time; the sky was green, and there was nothing but inky blackness on both sides of the ride.

"I vote we go right," Elektra said. "Just for the sake of the motto."

It was _do right and fear not_, he knew from somewhere. _Trite and pathetic._

He took a step, and as he did so the remnants of the ride rippled away from beneath him, morphing into decaying greenery. Distant chimes began to sound in the air.

"Kill them all! Seven move!" someone yelled. Kilobyte looked around to see the source of that; it took him several moments to realise that the source was on the ground, about a foot high, and rapidly advancing towards him in company with a group of similar-sized beings.

"Seven go!" the chorus returned.

"They're garden gnomes!" Elektra fired into the herd, scattering them; they reformed to make a semicircle, advancing inwards towards the intruders.

Kilobyte swept a tentacle close to the ground to trip them up. There was a sharp pain as small teeth bit, hard; he dropped the gnome in surprise.

"Seven up!" Another herd came running towards them; they didn't look like only seven.

"We move," he said, running alongside Elektra over the gnomes blocking their path, fleeing further into the maze. There was no point in wasting the energy fighting such masses of small minions; after the deadly ride, they had none to waste.

The journey through the maze was hellish. It was as geographically confusing as the rest of the Sixth Dimension, each hedge looking exactly identical and invariably taking them in a direction they could not understand. The gnomes nipped at their feet whenever they attempted to slow down, and threw primitive spears at them. The small creatures were indefatigable, wearing them down bit by bit as they struggled for a way out.

"We…should have gone left," Elektra said, leaning against a hedge, catching her breath as they waited for the gnomes to catch up again. "Sorry."

"A random choice." She looked in bad condition, bleeding blue from where a spear had penetrated her arm, covered in leaves and dirt from struggling through hedges, and he wasn't sure he felt any better. "We need to continue nonetheless." He made no move, though, to follow his own suggestion; _weak_, he thought of himself.

"I know. I just need to…get my breath back…"

"Seven jump!" A gnome leaped from the top of the hedge behind her, followed by his fellows; it was probably a different brood, Kilobyte thought in disgust. A spear ricocheted off his body armour as he turned to leave, on the run yet again.

The fathomless hedges surrounded them as they struggled to keep going, refusing to give in and allow the gnomes to savage their fallen bodies. It felt like it had been an eternity of this helpless fleeing.

_The hunt_, Kilobyte remembered. He was prey this time.

"Something…over there…" he heard Elektra gasp. She pointed into the distance, where at first he could see nothing. "The blue thing…"

It was small, a mere scrap of something blue on the distant horizon in front of the now-orange sky. But it was more variation than they had seen for some time in the scenery, and they went towards it as best they could, stumbling and shuffling along confusing hedgeways, keeping it in sight.

It was a structure, Kilobyte realised as at last it was starting to seem closer, an object constructed to stand slightly above the hedge. Some sort of landmark, if they were fortunate.

"Nearly there," Elektra said with unjustified optimism as they turned yet another corner.

"Seven of sevens!"

He was losing patience; he lashed out with a tentacle as though it was a whip, stiffening it to avoid another bite. The gnomes were scattered, temporarily. No longer caring about how much energy he used, he punched through one of the hedges in the direction of the structure, pulling Elektra behind him as they struggled through the rapidly regrowing foliage. There was another hedge blocking their path; grimly, ignoring his body's signals to stop, he forced his way through there as well, desperate to find _something_ in this landscape of bushes and gnomes.

"Up there then find a right turn," Elektra said, looking at him with some concern. "I said we were nearly there…"

"You were wrong," he told her, and punched through the next hedge. They were going to get out of here and win this game, no matter what it took.

And there it was, a blue, pristine fountain ringed by a final layer of hedge. The berries growing on it were large, was his first thought, and then he realised they were shrunken heads. Whispering to each other.

"Eww," Elektra said, and fired a blast at it. "That's _wrong_."

The hedge and the shrunken heads disappeared, and the air was silent and still.

"_My lord_," they heard a melodious female voice say, and looked to the fountain to see the green-skinned woman standing next to it, talking to a skeletal humanoid whom Kilobyte recognised as one of the game's bosses.

"Ace Lightning will arrive here soon enough," the skeleton said in a high, reedy voice. "You won't have to leave a body."

"It will be done." She inclined her head towards him as both memories faded out of existence.

"That's my _father_ they were talking about killing," Elektra muttered, looking towards where the woman had been. "No wonder my mother didn't like her."

"It seems your father did," Kilobyte said absently. He approached the fountain cautiously; the cool running water looked an attractive balm for their various wounds.

"_What ghosts demand my flow!_" a blue thing shrieked as he reached up to cover his ears. A blast of cold air swept through him as it dissolved through his body; he turned to see a disturbing-looking cross between bird and woman, still screaming, horribly audible despite any attempts to block her noise. "_Villains and heroes, monsters and saviours! You dare disturb my water!_"

"He didn't touch your water!" Elektra yelled. "Who are you?"

"_Nereida, the spirit of the fountain! My sprites and I shall punish you!_"

The water in the fountain seethed, rising from it to the air to form more shapes like the spirit, blue things with sharpened teeth and barbed wings, flying to the attack.

"Tell us where the amulet piece is and we will not hurt you," Kilobyte demanded.

"_Fight us first_," Nereida hissed, and flew to him.

They were intangible, yet they had some power to affect the physical part of the Sixth Dimension, sending freezing cold through the bodies of their foes, paralysing and draining them.

Elektra's blasts did little but irritate them; she was fast enough to dodge most of their attacks, but she was slowing quickly.

He backed away from Nereida, playing for time, trying to think of a way by which to defeat them, what they were and what would harm them. He twisted as she rushed upon him, backing towards the fountain; she passed through his left arm and left it feeling as cold and immovable as the marble of the fountain at his back.

"_Get away now, master-would-be, hero-never_," three of the things said in chorus as they advanced upon him. "_Dead-now, dead-world, go now!_"

He had no other alternative for a retreat; he thrust his elbow into the fountain's wall with the idea of using it as substitute for a shield. To his surprise, the trio gasped as though in pain. He pushed at the fountain again, and they writhed in the air; it had to be their power source.

Elektra fired, a strong blast lancing through the air and into the foundations of the structure; it toppled and shattered.

"_Evil-bad strong-wrong find your death!_" Nereida screamed in pain as her body was called down to the earth. "_Go!_" She and the sprites turned to amorphous masses of blue, sucked below into what remained of the fountain's water, morphing into the dirt.

Elektra sagged, flickering. "Where is the amulet piece?" she whispered. "We…I need it…"

He was already searching the shattered fountain as the obvious hiding place, prying apart the blue marble lying on the ground. "Nothing here," he said eventually. 'We have to…"

"Die." A rider appeared in front of their eyes, mounted on a pale horse and clad in a robe of absolute darkness, bearing a sharpened scythe in his right hand and an hourglass in his left, only a fragment of white bone visible below the hood of his robe.

Elektra gave a shuddering laugh. "It's death. It's what she meant. What death looks like."

"Pathetic and ugly. I am inclined to agree."

"Do not mock I. For I am Death, 'gainst whom no lock may hold nor fasten'd portal bar. I am Death, the great leveller, the friend…"

"…And you are dead."

This creature was easy to take and drain energy from; he struggled, trying to maneuver his scythe and moving about in Kilobyte's grasp, but he could not escape the inexorable strength.

Death's last breath was like desert air over an open coffin, a dry rattle, and then the minion melted away leaving only the hourglass behind.

Elektra hastened over to take up the hourglass. "That was amazing," she said, "I didn't think you had that sort of power left…" She hastened to beat the glass on a rock, trying to smash it open.

"I hadn't, either," he muttered to himself. What had come over him? He would not bow down to fate any more, he resolved, but fight to dominate this dimension.

The girl gave a small squeal of delight as the hourglass finally shattered to reveal the second amulet piece, and brought out her first one to put them together.

"They used to be able to summon people with two of these," she said; the look on her face could almost have been described as greedy. She closed her eyes, and pressed both pieces of the amulet against her chest.

"Mother," she whispered as the golden pieces drew towards each other.

There was a flash of golden light.

"…_Kicking butt and taking names_!" An arm passed through Kilobyte's torso as the red-haired woman walked confidently towards her daughter, her sword raised for battle. "_So who's the next freak in line?_"

Elektra watched her mother open-mouthed, her eyes so wide that she looked almost piscine.

"_Ha_!" the Knight called, and brandished her sword in her daughter's direction. "_Take that_!"

She had been insubstantial; her weapon's flame was not. Elektra was flung head-over-heels by the blast, landing on top of the fountain's remnant, spread out staring to the skies as the memory blinked out and disappeared.

He could have reached out and taken the amulet instead, but he offered her a hand to raise her to her feet. She was pale, and almost as drained as she had been before piecing together the amulet.

"I was wrong," she said in a whisper. "You can't summon the dead, nobody's supposed to, and once the worlds merged they didn't go back to the game or anything, they were gone forever."

She was about to burst into tears again, he could tell. "Reset it all and she'll be there," he told her. "Just don't try doing that with any more amulet pieces."

She nodded. "I won't." She turned listlessly. "The left path is the one that isn't where we came from."

The girl had been more right than she had expected, he reflected as the ground and sky changed again and they passed into another level. This one was underground; he did not trouble to wonder how they had passed from an open-air maze into the bowels of the earth, into dark passageways glinting with barely-hidden jewels.

They marched along the tunnel; the creatures to beware here were the Underminers, small creatures that disturbed the ground beneath their feet and would release a blast of noxious gases from their hindquarters, and vampire bats, which flew down from the roof and attempt to pierce their skin with teeth. His impatience grew in dealing with these, but it was more practical to avoid and brush them away rather than to attack them wholesale; the next humanoid minions would get no such quarter, he vowed. Other creatures flowed transparently through them, smoky and insubstantial past memories, vast wyrms and old crawling things and silent lanterns, but these were easy to ignore.

To Elektra's relief and his own irritation, the tunnel eventually opened up on a brightly lit hall, where a forge beast smelted and stirred a large pot of gold amidst heapings of gemstones.

"A grain of sand on a beach," Elektra whispered to him, pointing downwards. "If the amulet piece is there we'll never be able to find it."

"I would not be so sure." He could sense power in this dimension, and craved it as mortals craved food. He managed to smile weakly at her. "Don't worry."

A fireball sent them both diving in opposite directions; the forge beast had sensed them, and was already preparing to ignite another fireball.

Elektra was running down the ramp towards the main hall, firing at the beast as she went; he used two tentacles to grasp the central light fitting, swinging on it to fling himself atop the forge beast, clinging on to its spines as though he was a limpet trying to subdue a rock.

Kilobyte reached around with a tentacle, trying to get a grip on the vulnerable pale skin of its throat; it bucked and hurtled, with its movement throwing him against its spikes.

Elektra fired another blast in the beast's direction, aiming at its face; the hard gold covering its skin, though, ensured the shot had little effect. He clung on as it flicked its tail into the pot of molten gold, sending drops spreading over the cave; he burned as several fell on him, though did not relax his hold.

The beast roared loudly, and he saw Elektra take aim again; smoke was coming from its head now, and he hoped that meant it was weakening. His tentacle tightened around it, cutting off the noise; it bucked more fiercely to escape the stranglehold, trying to throw him into the gold to destroy him.

Another roar, and a second plume of smoke was rising from it; as it flung its head back, he noticed that its eyes were burned and blackened. Elektra aimed at its throat, and it shuddered again.

It flailed, blinded, the spiked tail knocking over piles of jewels, stumbling and desperately struggling. Its hind leg tripped on the cauldron's leg, forcing it to collapse; Kilobyte watched in growing dread as the liquid gold spread slowly over the floor, burning what it touched.

Elektra leaped up on a pile of jewellery to protect herself, not yet firing and giving the beast her location, waiting for a shot at its vulnerable spots. He kept tightening the stranglehold, ignoring the sudden pain as the beast pushed itself against the cauldron's rim.

The beast shifted from foot to foot, perhaps affected by the molten gold on the floor; he kept his grip nonetheless, focusing on being able to reach out and begin to drain its energy. His tentacle gripped the skin, straining more tightly against it, sliding as the beast fought against his efforts.

There it was, that particular conjunction where he could take its dying energy; he drew into himself the beast's powers, and pulled its head back so that Elektra could fire her shot.

It shuddered a last time as Kilobyte drained the last of its powers, impacted and burned by Elektra's fire, and faded into thin air, dropping him on the floor of molten gold.

His feet were on fire as he tried to walk to the sinking pile of jewels; he could feel them dissolving, his body consumed by fire.

Elektra threw something at his feet, a large gold bar; he stood upon that as it dissolved, and then moved his blackened feet to the next item she threw, slowly making it across to safety.

The pile she stood on was diminishing rapidly when she grasped his forearm to pull him the last bit of the way after an enormous red stone faded into the liquid metal, but she was smiling nonetheless as they stood together on the collapsing pile.

She brought her hands together, and golden light washed from them to destroy the deadly pool and leave them standing on cold ground. Kilobyte was dazzled by the power, and felt restored once again.

"I found the amulet piece," she explained, unnecessarily. "That's three. And I just remembered something."

"How to use its powers to save us?"

"That was easy. I just thought about what we needed and had faith," she said. "We've come so far and I didn't even bother to ask your name."

"It's Kilobyte," he told her as they passed through the way out of that cave. "Apparently related to computers…"

He looked back to notice she had frozen in shock.

"_Kilobyte_?" she repeated. He took a step back towards her, but she waved him off. "You…you're evil! And dead!"

He cursed himself for a fool; he should have told her his name at the beginning, to find out his identity. "I'm not dead," he said slowly and with what he thought of as considerable patience. "And I am nothing like those screaming fools that have been trying to kill us."

"You killed people. The Master Programmer used you to merge the worlds. You were my father's nemesis. The evil overlord." She fiddled with the amulet, her hand clutched around it like a talisman. "Don't you remember _any_ of that?"

He recalled the name she had used before: the Cyber Stalker. The memory of the hunt, where it was not he who had been prey. The blond man called Ace Lightning. Had he hated him so much a long time ago? No, it would have been _hunted_ him.

He was Kilobyte, and he had been used to merge the worlds. He was Kilobyte, and he had been programmed. He was Kilobyte, and he craved power…

"Look behind you!" Elektra called, interrupting his reverie, and he turned just in time to see a horde of zombies racing up towards them, armed with pitchforks and rifles.

He could defeat them with the power he knew he possessed, now. Crush them, in a hunt that was no challenge at all.

Kilobyte stepped forward, smiling as he attacked minion after minion, draining their powers and throwing away the shells. It was too easy for him to fight such as these, and in the power he absorbed he felt like a god.

Some of them were still conscious, pathetic lumbering things nursing their wounds and blubbering; he grasped the largest of them with a tentacle.

"Tell everyone you meet," he said, "that Kilobyte has returned."

He turned back to Elektra, who was still watching him, afraid of what he had been.

"I should have seen it," she said shakily. "You fight like…like…"

"Like someone who has protected as well as killed? Like someone who plans to change a game world?"

"I know I've killed too," she said, "and minions…they're not like sentients, but how you fight is…"

"You value mortals above your own people," he told her, "and since I woke I have not fought bar to defend myself or others."

She paused before speaking. "You…you did save me, heaps of times. And you could have taken the amulet if you wanted. You could still take it from me and kill me." Her voice was still shaky, but she was obviously trying to rationalise the situation. "You…did you really forget everything you were?"

"I did."

"And you…changed then. Because people can change." She sounded as though she was desperately grasping at straws. "And you're helping me save the world. Unless you don't want to. Now you know who you were."

To push the reset button, to restore both Earth and the Sixth Dimension to what they had been before war, before his forgetting. It was a cause he could get behind, he realised, still in shock at it all. He had known humans and knew what he was. "I will help you," he said.

"But what if you turn back to what you used to be?" she asked. "You're changed now…"

"And this is what the changed me desires." There were humans like Sam and Em and Teresa, who would prefer a restored world. There were sentients like himself who had been destroyed by events (_not by himself; he would not admit to that yet_). There was a world for beings such as himself which needed changing. He would not abandon a project he had chosen, and perhaps his will after months without past was truer than a recovery of his memories of programming.

"Then thank you," she said solemnly. She walked up to stand by his side. "I'm sorry I did not trust you."

She had no choice about continuing to trust him, he thought darkly as they walked on; she would not live either without him or if he decided to destroy her.

--

They passed through the mine, terrifying any minions they encountered; word about him was spreading through the Sixth Dimension, and he easily defeated any who would challenge him.

"Ace, it won't make you feel any better if you destroy him," he heard a female voice say as they passed through one of the mine's dark passageways; he looked back to see Elektra's mother helping a weakened-looking Ace Lightning along. "She betrayed him, she died, yadda yadda yadda. Get over it. We're s'posed to be saving the world, man!"

"From him. And I won't get over it. I can't."

The woman sighed. "So pull yourself together. We've got zombies on our trail and Mark on the phone, and we've gotta make it to Climbcrag before power hour."

They faded out as they made their slow way along the passageway, Elektra watching devotedly until the last moment.

He did not ask who the unnamed 'him' was in the dialogue.

The Nevershine Mine finally emerged into the bright red light of Climbcrag Castle, a leviathan of a building constructed—_programmed—_in the midst of red-hot lava flows, and he blinked at the sudden light of the three blazing suns.

A minion rushed past them, an armoured knight on a less-than-noble steed, its lance piercing Elektra's chest and leaving her unharmed. Three tusked boars, too, raced each other to impale some long-gone foe through a more recent rockfall.

A group of yokels approached them as they walked across the hot path, carrying makeshift weapons of hoes and sticks. Kilobyte picked up the one at the front by his neck.

"Do you know the name of Kilobyte?" he asked, putting all the power he could into his voice.

"Ki…Kilobyte," the yokel managed, struggling in the firm grip. He did not seem to remember; these stupid minions did not have long memories.

"I have the power to rule this place," Kilobyte told him. "Find the amulet piece and bring it to us, or I shall destroy you all." The knowledge of who he had been had unlocked a gate inside him; he had been the evil overlord, he could almost remember now, easily dominating this dimension while longing for greater conquests.

"…obey…please…"

"Let him down!" Elektra called. "He understands, don't hurt him any more."

Was he already, now, becoming what he had been in this world? He released the yokel suddenly, letting him fall hard on the tarred road. He was going to reset the worlds, he wasn't going to conquer and dominate and abuse power…

…or had he done so already? He shook his head. He would let no foolish minions interfere with his goal. This was in the name of efficiency.

A red sword flashed around them as they walked through the castle, within the high hollowed halls, where the tapers flashed crimson in concert with the apparition. The ground shifted beneath their feet and the sky changed to lightning-struck black as tapers in the castle lit themselves. They approached the battlements, up on the highest towers to view their next goal from above, and saw what appeared to be a battle in progress below.

Kilobyte recognised the walking skeleton, and realised it was part of the timeshifts experienced in this dimension. The two Knights were there too, fighting back-to-back against a legion of minions as he saw the skeleton fall and fade, destroyed by the Death severing his bony neck. And then, as Elektra's breath caught in her throat, he saw his own ghost, fighting savagely alongside his minions against a last-minute alliance, his tentacle picking up the red-haired Knight and viciously flinging her to the ground, his laughter as a red hornet pierced the blond Knight's side with its neverending poison.

He did not turn to look at Elektra's expression as the events unfolded beneath them.

And then horizontal lines ate across his figure below, splitting it and changing it; his arms and tentacles were stretched out by some unknown agency, forcing him into a shape that looked like a spread-out octopus, screaming. His chest seemed to open up through the lines, and through it was forced pale light that dissolved the memories as his own body disappeared.

It was the last battle before the merging, he realised, hating the sight of what had been done to him and what he had done.

Elektra's knuckles were white gripping the rail. "We should move on," she said eventually, turning away so he couldn't see her face.

"Master!" A yokel ran up to them, entirely unaware of the ghost-scene that they had just viewed below. "We found it. Another piece of the amulet of Zoar!"

"Give it to her," Kilobyte commanded brusquely. He would do nothing to make himself seem yet more repulsive.

Elektra placed the new amulet piece with the others, and a giant wasp appeared from the heavens.

"What is _that_?" she asked, looing up at what she had unintentionally summoned, but Kilobyte was already petting it.

"He's Fred," he said. "My giant mutant wasp. Of course he survived the fused worlds after all; he was fused himself." He could feel himself smiling at the reunion; though forgotten until now, he could recall that the wasp had been his faithful steed. And Fred had remembered too, flying straight to his side ready to fly, his antennae twitching in the way that meant he was content.

"I just wanted something that flew." Elektra approached cautiously. "Emphasis on the 'thing' part. Is he…safe?"

"Yes." Kilobyte mounted easily, the motion coming back to him with no trouble, and offered Elektra a hand up. "He'll take us to the junkyard quickly." The slight connection between the worlds he had left would last for some time, too small to be detected but made with enough power to be durable, and longer if Jessica had the ability to assist it, but time was still vital to their quest.

She climbed on behind him, clutching on to his back like a python around its prey. Had it been either of her parents, they would not have been so afraid of the height and the potential fall (_though they might have been afraid once, carried by Fred's pincers as a prisoner_).

Catastrophe Junkyard was empty bar rogue machinery, now; the Virus had numbered among the heroes. Kilobyte briefly wondered if his great strength had come in use, or if he had been so tormented over his past deeds he had done little of note. They swept over the Carnival, looking down to see where an amulet piece would likely have been placed, Fred skilfully avoiding sweeps of machine claws and cables.

The landscape shifted constantly, a metal sea throwing up pieces of alien gadgetry at odd intervals, dark grey and clouding. The sky was a darkened orange halfway through shifting to a sickly purple, as though a sun had exploded.

"There he is!" Elektra pointed down to a figure raising a clawed hand in the air and screaming something incoherent, a red eye blazing. Whether the image was the Virus as he had been programmed or from some later event Kilobyte could not tell; Random Virus had never differed much from his usual pattern of good-going-bad-and-complaining-about-it.

Kilobyte continued to survey the area; he directed Fred down to a large metal shell, the hull of some forgotten starship, dark in its interior. The wasp skirted close to it, giving his passengers a view of the inside, dark and almost empty.

"What about the crane over…" Elektra began, cut off as Kilobyte noticed something out of the corner of his eye and did a pinpoint turn on Fred.

There was something in there, and he was going to find out what.

"Well done," a voice said from the darkness. "Come into my Fortress, as the spider said to the fly. It won't hurt. I made sure these machines were under my control before I tried taking over the worlds with them."

It took Kilobyte a moment to recognise the voice, but as soon as he did all the memories connected to it returned very quickly.

"You." He slid off Fred himself, but left Elektra mounted; there would be a trap in this.

"Were you told that I died in the fusion?" He shuffled from the dark recesses of the hull, for Kilobyte to set eyes on him for the first time in twenty years. "I'm a survivor. But maybe not enough to try to destroy you this time."

"Tell me what you want before I destroy you, programmer." He had created Kilobyte for his own purposes, set him loose on a world to complete his dirty work for him, controlled him and used him as a living gateway between worlds.

"I want…to help you. Send the Lightning brat and the wasp away for a moment. You were always my finest creation." The shell that had once been the Master Programmer shuffled forward a little further; the years had changed him for the worse. He sat in a wheelchair now, a crude thing of bent scrap metal, and was as bald as his creation, with one eye missing and a twisted scar deforming his face.

Kilobyte signalled to Fred, who flew back, taking Elektra with him; "Are you sure?" she started to say to him, but he ignored her words as she flew away.

"You woke. Have the worlds separated yet, I wonder? They will soon. I had wondered if you would ever make it here—I was genius enough to leave you in suspension between the worlds and one or two traps planned. You'll be interested to know that it's directly because of her, not her because of your help as you've probably been thinking."

He said nothing, waiting for the programmer to finish digging his own grave.

"Program balance. Lightning Knight offspring and the last evil. If she hadn't been born you might have stayed in limbo forever. But that doesn't matter."

"Get on with it."

"The amulet, Kilobyte. It's up to you to take it before the worlds get too far away to reset them. Better you than a Knight's brat." He laughed slowly. "End it while there's still time."

Kilobyte looked down at the broken thing in its chair. "You weren't the genius you thought," he said slowly. "You were destroyed by the minions you set free."

"It learns. I programmed you with some of my own intelligence." It shrugged. "The real me is dead. There goes your revenge, Kilobyte. What do you think of that now, creation?"

"Past time you followed him into oblivion."

It laughed again. "I can't die. I'm the ghost of my own machine; haven't you understood that yet? A leftover program, what personality my creator left with me, the last remainder of true humanity in this dimension. Destroy me if it will satisfy you, Kilobyte. Seize the amulet and gratify your program. It's everything I gave to you. My finest creation."

It reached out a hand towards him, taking it from the blanket draped over its lap to reveal that it was nothing but a few scraps of skin positioned over yellowing bones. Kilobyte backed away from it.

"I don't know what you want," he said warily. "I will do nothing for you."

The laugh seemed to fill the entire cavern. "You will."

Kilobyte dived forward as the metal surrounding the program's form began to liquefy around it. The laughter continued even as the thing collapsed into the metal sea below it, leaving Kilobyte with nothing but a grey smear of it on his hand and sinking ground below his feet.

He reached up with two tentacles to grasp the top of the hull and pull himself from the morphing metal; the hull itself dissolved under his touch, beginning to collapse over his head. He would be destroyed if he could not make it out in time; _where _were_ they_? He half-walked, half-swam, sinking all the while, trying to make it out of the cave, seeing the falling hull dip lower and lower on his horizon. Five steps, he counted, five steps to escape this place, up to knees, to waist, to chest, to neck, reaching for a way out of there. His head went under; he did not need to breathe, but he could feel the machines around him scraping at his shape already. He kept a tentacle raised above the metal, his last hope as he sank further, pushing in what he hoped was the right direction to signal aid, waiting for Fred and Elektra to hurry. As the tentacle began sinking below the metal and his world turned to black, his last thought was to wish he had called for help while he had had the chance.

And then air surrounded him again, and he was in light; he placed a hand to his eyes to shield them from the sudden glare. It had been an easy trap to escape after all.

Elektra laughed behind him. "I think I really understand how to use the amulet pieces now. It was in one of the cranes, behind the main engine bit, with some sort of defence system that I had to blast."

"How…convenient," he said. Her tricks with the artefact did not impress him; he remembered that the completed amulet had been his property, once.

"And I'm sorry I didn't see you until Fred started heading towards your tentacle," she added quickly. "You're okay, right?"

"I survived the experience, yes."

"What did the Master Programmer want to say?" she asked curiously.

_That I will never be rid of him. That I should take power from you and use it myself. That I still do not understand the world in which I have woken._

"Very little. I doubt we will hear from him a second time. What area do we have yet to visit before the Haunted House?" She would know better than he where the second last piece of the amulet would be located; nothing was springing to his mind at present.

Elektra paused in thought. "Circus, Horror Hedge, Climbcrag, Nevershine Mine before that, Catastrophe junkyard now… The House of Illusion."

_Of course_. He could begin to remember it, now. "Then let us go," he said, urging Fred to the sky.

--

It had once been a pretty place by mortal standards. Fern gardens, crystal waterfalls, fanciful pink designs, bright-coloured spiders weaving silver webs.

It had fallen into ruin. The ferns were brown and rotting, the waterfalls dry and broken, the architecture burned and smashed, and most of the spiders long gone by now.

"She was…important to my father," Elektra said.

He knew, now, just how important, but said nothing.

"I used to wonder, when I was a child, what would have happened if she'd still been around, if maybe my father wouldn't have faded away, if my mother would have minded as much as she said, if I'd still exist…"

"We're approaching," Kilobyte told her, bringing Fred down for a landing. He had no wish to hear any more of the dead woman.

They walked slowly through the old rockery, looking carefully for any signs of the amulet; a spider-maid had run through them shrieking, though aside from that and a nagging feeling that the rockery had turned out to take up far more geographical space than possible, they had been left at peace in their search.

"I think we should go to the House itself," Elektra said with a sigh, straightening up from staring at the rocks. "Maybe it appeared in the inner sanctum."

Kilobyte took a last look around; he could not sense power nearby. They would find it soon enough, he promised himself, and then they would take the last piece and complete their quest.

The hallway leading into the House was stained a dull red; it was probably not blood, but the suggestion of it was enough in the ruined stronghold. Elektra plucked an old taper from the wall, and lit it with her powers to use as a makeshift torch.

"It's kind of creepy, but it must have been really nice once," she said. "Why don't you like it?"

"I…" He paused. _Did you ask many questions about her_? _Pointed ones_?

Dreading what he could find, he followed the girl down the long hall, through painted rooms brutally raided and past long-despoiled walls, alert for any sign of the amulet.

He looked up as something moved to his left, and saw it was only a small spider, running in fear from the large intruders to its home. This would not be long, he reminded himself. They would reach their goal soon enough.

The central sanctum was a large hall with a smashed skylight at the top, letting soft purple light in; a platform lay on the ground split almost in half by some force, and two more platforms hung dusty on the walls. In the centre of the room was a plain white pillar Elektra had rushed forward to check before stepping back in disappointment.

He reached up for the nearest platform with a tentacle, to pull it to the floor in order to make certain no amulet pieces were hidden on it.

"What are you doing?" Elektra asked.

He let her deduce the obvious as he tugged on it, the ancient wood creaking under his force.

"Don't destroy the place," she said. "It's bad enough already."

_Don't destroy the place any more_.

"Very well," he said, and settled for merely doing a perfunctory sweep of a tentacle on each of the raised platforms. "Not here," he said. "Perhaps it is in the foliage outside."

"Or the attics," Elektra suggested.

He sighed, giving in with poor grace. "Then let us go to the attics."

Old trunks had spilled ancient clothing and gewgaws upon the floors, and it took some time to check through the debris. Reflected in a window was the moving image of a gang of zombies raiding this place in firelight, fading away as one of them raised an axe to knock a hole that remained there. It was midnight blue outside by the time they had discovered all the upper rooms and secret attics, exploring the remnants of a programmed society.

Kilobyte stood from crouching over a half-burned oak chest filled with shells. "The foliage, then," he said, and Elektra followed him back down into the garden.

"Uncle Brett would have loved to see these when they still grew," Elektra mused as she wandered through them. "They're lovely."

"Of course." The plants were far too frilly for his tastes, but to disagree might force him to stay here for longer. It had been, what, half a demicycle since the last memory had appeared in front of them? Too long, he thought, worried.

They walked along four long circular paths through the garden; two of them might have been the same, but Elektra insisted that the ferns were a different shade. The sky's shade had lightened, blue like an ink-washed paper hanging out to dry. It was taking far too long, Kilobyte thought again.

A graffiti-decorated statue they approached replicated Lady Illusion's form; Elektra had a giggle about that particular programming choice. He looked around it, on the ground in case the amulet piece had been hidden there, as Elektra checked the statue itself to discover its secrets.

"Nothing," she said; she had finally started to sound frustrated. "What could have happened to it?"

"Only the south wall remains," he reminded her, taking the opportunity to sound reasonable. "If not there, we can go straight to the Haunted House."

They followed a path heavily bounded with tangled foliage, forcing their way through some places where vines had all but consumed the stones, eventually discovering a long walkway shielded by trees and a small door set into the side of the House.

And there she was; it had been too much to expect, after all, that everything could have been erased from here. She was running again, in her true form, breathing harshly with a look of fear in her eyes.

Next to him, Elektra was watching too.

"And what do we have here?" he heard someone else say. He did not look in that direction.

The woman turned quickly, a crystal ball ready in her hand, but it was dashed from her by force.

"A traitor. I promised you death." A laugh. "Never let anyone say I do not keep my word."

The most merciful thing about it was that it was fast; she was brave enough, meeting his eyes and refusing to bow her head until the last; he was reminded of Em's strength and pride in some odd way. She faded into the air, yet another casualty of war.

There was no question now of what he had been.

Elektra was turned away from him, carefully examining one of the trees. He hesitantly took a step towards her; she turned around, her face a mask of accusation.

"No wonder my mother told me you were evil," she yelled at him. "It's not even enough that you forgot."

"I know," he said; it was the only reply he could give. "I'm…sorry."

"Whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved," Elektra muttered. "We can forgive…" She put her hand to her forehead, covering her eyes. "One amulet piece left now," she said. She pointed behind where the apparition had been, a fragment blended into the wood of the door. He did not think the price had been worth it. "Just one to go."

He moved aside for her to claim the piece; she did not attempt to produce anything by this union, simply slamming them together and waiting for the join to take effect. "Call Fred," she said tightly. "We'll go to the Haunted House now."

--

It was another decaying ruin. More imposing than the House of Illusion, the Haunted House stood square and black in the centre of a grey plain. The sky above it was coal-black, lit only by a full moon like a golden eye. Red rain cascaded down as they made their way to its stone door.

The dead owned it. They were met at the door by yellowed skeletons, chittering things that surrounded them, reaching out with bony hands to drag the travellers into their lair as the stone door scraped in closing. Elektra shuddered as they reached for her clothing, ripping off one of her flimsy human sleeves as they dragged her onwards.

"Stop," Kilobyte commanded; he felt as if his tongue had been stopped by the presence of the dead. "Take us to the centre."

The skeletons paused for a moment, and then a larger shape appeared in the distance; it was a monolith, a behemoth of polished bone, a creature whose gargantuan spine brushed along the top of the towering ceiling. It had a long pale trunk, slowly curling downwards to him, and black eyes that seemed to hold him in thrall…

The minions needed _control_, he realised suddenly. Why else had he been overlord, if not for this?

He let the power that he craved rule him. "Get away from me," he said, and in the tone of his voice the skeletons actually heard something to fear. He lashed around him with a tentacle, clearing away and breaking the bones, taking powerful, deliberate steps and clearing more ground around him. "Down, animal." For a moment the monster simply stared at him; he took a step forward, raising a hand and calling all his powers to himself. "I. Said. Down."

Something hidden deep inside him was surprised as it knelt before him, though a larger part accepted it as merely his due; he needed to be like this, to survive this world. "Let her go," he commanded, looking at Elektra, nearly on the opposite end of the hall, surrounded by the skeletons,

One by one, they released her as she got back to her feet, brushing herself down.

"Now show me to the centre of this place. Before I destroy each and every one of you."

A pale, female zombie drifted into the room, her presence dispersing the skeletons; she wore a long, white robe, as though she was disguised as a human ghost. She gave a slight nod to Kilobyte, and drifted further up the hallway, down a passageway hung with crimson tapestry. Elektra and Kilobyte trailed along behind her, waiting for the end of the quest.

They passed through a room filled with the animated skeletons of smaller creatures, perhaps bats or toads; Kilobyte stepped on them freely, crushing those who did not retreat from his path. He would control this place. He caught Elektra looking at him with what he thought was puzzlement, but he ignored her; the battle was nearly over.

In the second room, some witches and wizards attempted to block their path through; he dealt with them brutally, pushing aside any minion that dared to get in his way. Elektra did not try to correct him; to impose order upon these minions was a need she could not deny.

Minions of all sorts, yokels and zombie servants and painted clowns, bowed to him in the third room; he did not bother to make any acknowledgements. It was merely his due, for his powers.

The final long corridor took them down a long flight of steps, past chained and deceased prisoners bound to the walls, into the bowels of the dungeon. At last there was a heavy, oaken door before them, and the zombie seemed to melt away, leaving them to find the last of the way in on their own.

Kilobyte did not hesitate. He raised a hand to the doors, and when they did not budge pushed them open; it cost him power, but he refused to show any external signs of the use.

It appeared as though the room had not been used in centuries rather than mere decades. Cobwebs covered its walls and the lid of the organ that was the main piece of furniture, a vast instrument standing in front of a row of tarnished brass pipes.

"Where is it?" Elektra wondered aloud. She walked to the centre of the room, bending down to examine the floorboards.

It was in here; Kilobyte could sense its power. Where, though, remained harder to pinpoint. He examined the walls and the candles, searching for either secret panelling or some clever concealment.

Strange music sounded, and he looked over to the organ to see the skeletal figure sitting at it, his hands running through the lid as the echo of the tune played on. The music continued even as the memory faded out, an eerie soundtrack to their vital quest. Elektra walked over to examine the instrument, brushing cobwebs from it with her sleeve.

A harsh note sounded as she tapped one of the keys, air forced out of a pipe for the first time in long years.

"Ugh," she said, but tried another note anyway, experimenting with the unmelodious sounds that came out of it and driving away the past echoes.

He passed along the final wall, on the lookout for any location that could conceal an amulet within, and came to stand next to Elektra as she played.

"Nowhere I can find," he said.

She played another note combination, frowning. "It has to be somewhere," she said. "This reminds me of something I was told once…"

The organ. It was obvious.

"Stand aside," he told her tersely, and stood in front of the organ himself. He could sense the power now, so close to him; instead of bothering to try to discover the correct key, he slammed two tentacles into it, piercing through its ancient wood as a sigh came from the pipes.

A single note sounded, and green smoke rose to fill the room; the secret compartment opened, and inside was the final piece of the Amulet of Zoar.

Elektra reached for it slowly, too slowly; he could have so easily seized it first.

"We did it," she said, as though disbelieving the fact before her eyes. "Thank you for saving me," she continued formally. "I…wish the best for you in the changed worlds. And if you ever get to see Jessica or Rebecca again, give them my love…" She looked down at the pieces in her hand again. "I never really thought we'd actually get this far." She shook her head, biting her lip. "Well. Here goes nothing."

The central piece of the amulet flew towards the others to form a perfect triangle, and the world was bright for a second.

"…Well?" Kilobyte asked. He felt his own powers diminished, with the completed amulet in another's hand.

"I don't know," Elektra said in a bewildered tone. She looked down at herself as though expecting to find she had disappeared. Her tattered human clothing had morphed into a Knight's uniform, but no other change had occurred inside the room, and the ghostly music struck up another tune. "I tried to get it to work. Maybe it did. We can go see."

It was her the minions offered obeisance to as they made their way from the chamber, the bearer of the Amulet of Zoar; she had won the game, Kilobyte knew, a Knight victorious.

The Haunted House, too, was unchanged; the minions were the same as when they had arrived, and memory-patches and shifting floors remained.

"It didn't work," Elektra finally concluded, unhappily watching a memory of Lord Fear walk through a wall as the pattern on the floor dissolved and reformed beneath them. "What do I do now?" She studied the amulet, turning it over and over in her hand.

_Anything you want._ "Concentrate on it," Kilobyte told her. She had all the power anyone could want. "Have your _faith_."

"I'm trying." She screwed up her face in concentration. "I can't seem to get it, though. I'll figure it out eventually."

"My lady." An approaching minion, a vampiric-looking male, bowed to her. "There has been a gathering in the courtyard for your approval."

"I guess I'll go, then. But I'm not a lady."

The minion bowed again. "As you command."

Atop the Haunted House, it seemed as though the entire population of the Carnival of Doom had arrived to greet their new conqueror. They had not done the same for him upon his arrival here, Kilobyte reflected, and tried not to be envious.

Elektra appeared over the balcony, and they all knelt in respect of the bearer of the amulet as a vast whispering silence swept across the crowd.

"I…I'm trying to change the worlds," she said. Impromptu speech-making was clearly not one of her skills. "To restore everything here as well as Earth. Erm…I…I just want to do my best while I'm here." She stepped back, to the accompaniment of a loud cheer; such minions were foolish enough to cheer for anything.

"I don't like this," she said to Kilobyte as they walked along one of the Haunted House's passageways, after yet another servant-minion had bowed before her. "People aren't supposed to…to worship other people, it isn't right no matter how many amulets are involved."

"They are little more than what the program made them," he said. "Not intelligent enough to understand."

"You told me once I thought more of mortals than the people like myself," she replied. "I hate that I'm some sort of false god to them. And I can't even help them by doing what I need to do."

"You will." She would have to figure it out sooner or later; he could sense how to do it himself, use the amulet's powers to reach through the small hole of the portal, overturn what had been and return to before the destruction of the worlds, a simple matter of resetting. The portal would remain intact for some time still, but she would need to achieve it soon.

Yet in the days that passed she did not. She spent much of each day dealing with the minions who brought petitions to her, attempting fairness and justice in a world ripping itself apart; Kilobyte provided the practicality. She complained of tiredness, and would sleep for sizeable portions of time, returning looking as harried as before. He tried to talk of this trouble to her, but she did not like to speak of it, either ignoring or avoiding him.

It had to come to a head, he knew, and made his plans.

"What…?" she began, waking from slumber in what was complete darkness to her. She reflexively clutched her hand around the amulet, making sure it was still in her possession. "Where am I? Let me out of here!" She stared around herself, but Kilobyte had left no light for her to see in the central underground chamber.

She stumbled to her feet, freeing herself of the bedding that the minions had carried down with her, blindly feeling the air to discover this place to which she had been taken.

"You remain in the Haunted House," Kilobyte told her from the darkness, not wishing her to waste the effort of discovering it on her own. "In the central chamber. Perhaps the power of it will help you."

"Help me what?" She lurched towards his voice; he put out a tentacle to keep her in the centre of the room.

"Help you reset the worlds. You have nothing to concentrate on but the amulet here. Do it."

"I can't!" She raised her arms, trying to find some surface to touch. "Let me out of here. I'm supposed to hear a petition today at second demicycle, then go down to the Circus and…"

"I have told all concerned that your appointments have been cancelled. Nothing needs to concern you but this."

"You can't _do_ this to me!" She sounded more like a petulant child than he had ever heard her; perhaps her new powers had not done well by her.

"Reset the worlds," he repeated. "They were both destroyed. You merely shore up a few cracks in the midst of an earthquake."

"I tried, I tried over and over, I'm still working on it, it'll happen someday…"

"Make it happen before the portal closes itself. You will remain here with the amulet until you have succeeded; nothing will occur to disturb you." The sense of the power she held was almost overpowering, but he held to his resolve to complete this quest in the manner planned.

"How long…" she began.

"As long as it takes."

She sat back down on the ground, blinking owlishly.

"What if I need anything special?" Her questions were a pitiful attempt at defiance; she could have defeated him with the powers of the amulet, but he had been counting on her obedience to his logic.

"You will not. Now concentrate. There will be no more words."

She finally did as he had asked, closing her eyes and turning the amulet over and over in her hands, frowning as she tried to think of her goal.

"I can't do it," she said after the first demicycle. "Turn on the lights. Please."

"No. Continue."

She did not obey, settling for sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and waiting for him to relent. He did not, and eventually she began again. Tears began to run down her cheeks as the fourth demicycle began, but he said nothing as he continued to watch her progress.

An edge of the amulet cut into her hand, and data flowed; she clumsily bound the wound with a scrap from her uniform when she realised that he would not help her, though the cut continued to leak and bathed her hands in leaking data as she endlessly turned the amulet through them.

Six demicycles, and she had collapsed into sleep, the amulet still clutched in her hand. He let her rest for half a demicycle, and then woke her with a painful shock.

"I'm trying!" she cried, pulling herself into a seated position once again. "I really am, I'm trying, praying too, I just can't do it, stop this, please…" She kept talking to herself and muttering prayers throughout the demicycle, and then finally fell into silence. Another cut bloomed on her hand, but she seemed not to notice it.

By the tenth demicycle, she had fallen into stillness, gazing blindly at the amulet in her hands while data slowly dripped from them. She did not move at all from there, not for the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth demicycle, a child-Knight staring blankly at the darkness in front of her eyes.

The portal, he knew, would close. He had no choice, he told himself.

It was a simple matter to snatch the amulet from unresisting hands, and simpler still to carry out what he had envisioned many times over the previous days of waiting.

The worlds were connected by a single strand, one amulet to control them both; Elektra had raised her head to stare in his direction, but he paid her no heed. It had gone wrong ten, twenty years ago, worlds fused by programmer with brutal ambition, battle and death before that, a coming to the Sixth Dimension…

…and it was _there_, where the world had changed, where he knew what he had to do.

It was such a simple matter, to save the two worlds.

The shifting of the dimension grew more rapid, and all the past memories screamed with one voice. Elektra reached out a hand towards him, screaming too; he watched her hair grow and stream out behind her like a flag, crying out as she felt the datastream behind her. Human screams were erased, and minions' devastation passed. Light streamed past him at thousands of gigabytes per minute, washing through him as the amulet's power changed worlds.

What had happened, was now undone.

The amulet dissolved in Kilobyte's hand as he walked from the Haunted House to examine his domain.

--

The minion paused in front of him, out of breath as he struggled to get his message out.

"The House of Illusion," he gasped. "She's surrounded. Will you go to finish it?"

"I will," he heard himself saying, summoning Fred down from the sky.

She had betrayed him, attacking him in concert with Lord Fear and the mortal brat, and could not avoid him in this dimension for long; that was the way of the world. He could not but destroy her.

She was running along the south wall as Fred flew down from the sky, in her true form as she fled, racing to a small door set into it.

"And what do we have here?" he said, leisurely disembarking.

She materialised a crystal ball in her hand; he knocked it from her with a tentacle.

"A traitor. I promised you death," he continued. A poor hunt, this. He laughed. "Never let anyone say I do not keep my word."

He grabbed her, imprisoning her in the cold grip of a tentacle, and prepared the energy drain that would destroy her for good.

She stopped struggling, resigned, meeting his eyes with remaining strength behind her own that made him remember…

…a _human_? She was nothing like, this green-skinned treacherous minion, no relation to the human woman who had offered him shelter. Yet the memory had some meaning to him, after all.

He uncoiled the tentacle from her, dropping her back on the ground. "Go," he told her. "Flee to Earth, do as you will. I have more urgent matters to resolve."

She looked startled, disbelieving; once she was certain that she had not imagined it, she quickly disappeared, taking advantage of his mercy.

"Call off the pursuit," he called to the minions behind, and mounted Fred again. He would need to be fast to finish this, before plans came to fruition…

The Master Programmer was exactly where he should have been, he was glad to discover, in a cage in the centre of the Circus.

The man looked up at him and smiled, and that was his first mistake.

"What have you been planning, programmer?" Kilobyte asked, twisting a tentacle around the programmer's neck and forcing it against the cage. "To destroy me? To use me a second time in service of your schemes?"

"I'm trapped here," the mortal managed to get out, his face turning an ugly shade of purple. "How can I plan anything…"

It was his second mistake.

"You managed once," Kilobyte spat. "I won't give you the chance to manage it again."

He tightened his hold, watching dispassionately as the programmer's eyes bulged and his face darkened. It was a murder; it was all he knew to do to stop the destruction.

He let the mortal's shell fall to the bottom of the cage; the minions could deal with a human corpse. He left that prison, feeling suddenly light-headed. He had prevented a death, he had murdered the programmer; what was there left for him to complete?

His form seemed to ripple; he brought his right hand to his face and noticed the planes of its data flicker, as though he was being pulled into the datastream, piece by piece. He took a step forwards, and nearly toppled over; the power seemed gone from him now.

He whistled for Fred; it seemed an age before the wasp arrived to his side. Stumbling onto its back, he set a course for the Haunted House. He could attempt to bully some of the minions into attempting to discover a cure for what ailed him, try to force this through, live through this…

He looked down at his body atop the flying wasp; it felt insubstantial, dwindling into smoke as the amulet had.

_The amulet_. It sparked a memory in him. _The Master Programmer had encouraged him to take it._

"The junkyard," he muttered, struggling to keep his seat and redirect the flight. "Take me to the junkyard."

It seemed another age to travel; he felt almost too weak to concentrate, as though he was a tethered balloon about to drift into the sky. Finally, the junkyard appeared before him; it was not yet the metal sea, but large dark piles of scrap metal spread over the ground.

He landed in the centre, slipping off Fred and standing to wait, trying to focus on remaining upright.

"You carried out my second master plan, Kilobyte," the voice said, coming from a speaker to his left. "Or my third. Time travel can be a little confusing."

"I defeated you," Kilobyte told him. It had not been enough; the Master Programmer of the future had become part of the Sixth Dimension itself, small fragments of his personality infused among the machines of the junkyard. And other parts of the Sixth Dimension. "It was the amulet. It always was."

"Correct. I made enough of a change to make sure you wouldn't survive the experience. You came close to winning. Trying to force the girl like that—clever. It would have taken me some time to think of that one. But my programming skill worked, and you are about to be deleted for good."

"I destroyed your body." The Programmer's plan had been so simple, to repair the damage mistakenly done to himself; allow the amulet to be put back together, put the virus on it that would destroy the agent, and be transformed with the rest of the Sixth Dimension to here, where his body would have waited…

"I can build myself a new one. Maybe one like yours, I put a lot of work into your program. Being here is so much more than being mortal." The Programmer laughed. "Game over, Kilobyte."

"No." He was weak, but he still had the powers the programmer had given him; he grasped part of the machinery surrounding him, sensing it with his abilities. The Sixth Dimension was of human machines, a network construct in its own right; he concentrated, feeling its presence in his mind.

"You can't even stand any more. I said _game over_."

The words were some sort of keyword for the virus; he could feel his body slipping from him. Fred whined nervously.

A large metal block from a crane hurtled downwards as he fell to the ground. He looked back in dawning horror and saw Fred's legs still wriggling beneath it.

"No," he said again.

"Go ahead, dissolve into the datastream," the Programmer said. "Let's finish this, creation."

_More than your creation_. He thought it rather than said it as his form finally dissolved.

"Too easy," the Programmer gloated. "Of course, I…"

_You are dead._ He did not bother with gloating or last-minute words, but fought to overwhelm the presence with his own.

The Master Programmer had at the last minute downloaded some of himself into the machinery of the Sixth Dimension. He had not done a good job.

Kilobyte reached to those fragments of the programmer, and pushed hard with his own mind. He had been programmed to be powerful.

The foreign presence was there, with him set into the very fabric of the Sixth Dimension; he pushed himself into it, fighting this battle between creator and created, mind against mind.

It was saving the world, after a fashion, completing what a Knight girl had died for. Almost freedom, in a way, from the need for power that had been forced in his program…

He sent himself against the dark fragments of the Master Programmer's presence. They were equally matched, in the end. There was no rest here, no bodies to tire, just the will of the creator against the creation. It was an almost inevitable last battle, the act before the curtain fell, here at the end of the journey before the beginning of the end.

Only one thing remained to do, he realised; he thought Elektra would have approved, though unlike her he would not choose this in innocence.

The traces of the virus the Programmer had used were still present in him; he pulled them from his files, altering them for a more suitable purpose. The Programmer sensed what he was doing, and bound his own fragments to Kilobyte's, forcing them together.

He was Kilobyte, and he could fight for something real…

He activated the virus, and felt nothing as he was dissolved.

--

_fin_


End file.
